Apportionment and Pennsylvania’s Fair Share Act
In 2011, Pennsylvania enacted the Fair Share Act, which was remedial legislation designed to mitigate the unfairness of joint and several liability in mass, and other, tort litigation by abrogating...
View ArticleSophisticated Intermediary Defense in Asbestos Cases – Use With Discretion
“Discretion is the better part of valor.” Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth. A recent asbestos case illustrates the perils of improvidently asserting a sophisticated intermediary defense, when the...
View ArticleEverything She Just Said Was Bullshit
At this point, most products liability lawyers have read about the New Jersey verdicts returned earlier this month against Johnson & Johnson in four mesothelioma cases.[1] The Middlesex County jury...
View ArticleLegal Remedies for Suspect Medical Science in Products Cases – Part One
Expert witness opinions about the nature and cause of plaintiffs’ medical conditions, are the linchpin of mass tort cases involving claims of bodily injury from allegedly harmful products. The quality...
View ArticleLegal Remedies for Suspect Medical Science in Products Cases – Part Two
The Federal Multi-District Silicosis Proceedings Before Judge Janis Jack One of the most significant developments in the role of scientific and medical evidence gatekeeping under Rule 702, and the...
View ArticleIngham v. Johnson & Johnson – Passing Talc Off As Asbestos
In talc exposure litigation of ovarian cancer claims, plaintiffs were struggling to show that cosmetic talc use caused ovarian cancer, despite missteps by the defense.[1] And then lawsuit industrialist...
View ArticleIngham v. Johnson & Johnson – A Case of Meretricious Mensuration?
There are a few incontrovertible facts underlying the Ingham fiasco. First, only God can make asbestos; it is not a man-made substance. Second, “asbestos” is not a mineralogical or geological term. The...
View ArticleThe Lobby – Cut on the Bias
When ordinary citizens hear about lobbies, they think about highly paid former elected officials pressing the interests of manufacturing and service industries in the federal and various state...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Big Blue versus Asbestos Fiber Type Egalitarianism
The differential potency for causing mesothelioma among asbestos varieties is well established. In the year 2000, John Hodgson of the Epidemiology and Medical Statistics Unit, in the British Health and...
View ArticleHistorical Malfeasance from Lawsuit Industry Expert Witnesses
“The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time-and then shut up.” ― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land Is David Rosner’s and Gerald Markowitz’s...
View ArticleTort Law’s Sleight of Hand – Part 2
There was sadly no dearth of cases of asbestosis or silicosis before the publication of the Restatement (Second) of Torts. Before 1965, legal doctrine and state and federal regulatory regimes saw the...
View ArticleTort Law’s Sleight of Hand – Part 3
The suppression of the industrial nature of most asbestos personal injury cases was on full display in the New Jersey’s controversial decision in Beshada v. Johns-Mansville Products Corporation.[1]...
View ArticleTort Law’s Sleight of Hand – Part 4
Beshada’s refusal to consider the industrial context of asbestos claims, with the usual involvement of sophisticated employers charged with providing a complex safety program for its workers, became...
View ArticleTort Law’s Sleight of Hand – Part 5
A supreme flouting of the military and industrial contexts can be found in DeVries v. Air & Liquid Systems Corporation,[1] where two former Navy sailors, plaintiffs John DeVries and Kenneth...
View ArticleTort Law’s Sleight of Hand – Part 6
The dissenting justices, in an opinion by Justice Gorsuch, would have affirmed the trial court’s application of the bright-line bare metal defense, in DeVries. Citing black-letter law as restated by...
View ArticleTort Law – Theory versus Practice
The Journal of Tort Law was founded, in 2006, by Jules Coleman as a scholarly forum for exchange of heterodox views of tort law. Under its current Editor In Chief, Christopher Robinette, the journal...
View ArticleDr. Harry Shubin – Asbestos Litigation Hall of Shame
Many physicians took and failed the so-called B-reader examination for proficiency in using the International Labor Office’s grading schema of chest radiographs for pneumoconiosis. Famously, Irving...
View ArticleNJ Appellate Division Calls for Do Over in Baby Powder Dust Up
There was quite a bit of popular media reporting of the $117 million (compensatory and punitive damages) awarded by a Middlesex County, New Jersey, jury to a man who claimed his mesothelioma had been...
View ArticleJudge Jack B. Weinstein – A Remembrance
There is one less force of nature in the universe. Judge Jack Bertrand Weinstein died earlier this week, about two months shy of a century.[1] His passing has been noticed by the media, lawyers, and...
View ArticleThe History of Litigations – Silica Litigation
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is...
View Article