Sunburst, a tiny town eight miles down Interstate 15 from the Canadian border, had a bit of an "Erin Brockovich" moment this week when the state Supreme Court ruled that Texaco must pay for cleaning up toxic spills that date back more than half a century.

The community's 2001 lawsuit brought a blizzard of defenses from Texaco, requiring a high court opinion and a couple of concurrences and dissents stretching to 99 dense pages. The justices all agreed that Texaco should pay $15 million for restoration, but a majority sent the issue of punitive damages back for retrial.

The ruling made for interesting reading. It seems a refinery operating between 1924 and 1961 leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline, including known carcinogenic compounds, into the ground and under the community, but nobody knew until gases gathered in house in 1955. It exploded.

According to the district court, Texaco's actions "were conducted recklessly and maliciously, as those terms are defined by Montana law." The court said the company "consistently minimized the problem and failed to accurately report [its] findings," and "endeavored to save money with full knowledge that the plaintiffs and the property would be harmed as a result."

The case was a legal tangle, but one result seems clear: the opinion strongly argued that damages imposed for restoration costs should not be limited.

Texaco had asserted that damages imposed to restore the land to safe levels of contaminants could not exceed a property's market value. In the court's majority opinion, Justice Brian Morris teed off on that idea.

He said limiting restoration awards to market value would be like giving a company like Texaco "a private right of inverse condemnation ... akin to a private right of eminent domain." That would create an incentive for a company "to disregard or discount risks of contamination or pollution to neighboring property owners," and leave those owners with a "take it or leave it" proposition to either sell out or live with toxic chemicals.

It makes perfect sense to ensure that people harmed by somebody's wrongdoing should be made whole. As Morris wrote, "Injured property owners in Montana should not be forced into such a Hobson's choice."