All Am. Oilfield, LLC v. Cook Inlet Energy, LLC

WINFREE, Justice.

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1910 the United States Congress passed Alaska's first mineral dump lien statute, granting laborers a lien against a "dump or mass" of hard-rock minerals for their work creating the dump. After piecemeal revisions, Alaska's 1933 territorial legislature amended the dump lien statute to include oil and gas development, creating a framework for technological advances in the state's nascent oil and gas industries. The mineral dump lien statute has remained substantively unchanged since, and we have infrequently addressed it.

We accepted certified questions from…