Articles

The title of this post may seem self-evident, but it is nevertheless reassuring that the California Supreme Court unanimously recognized the inherent logic in this principle, given the constant efforts by the plaintiffs’ bar to expand the reach of tort liability. The Court rejected a recent effort to expand products liability in this morning ...

In a split decision that bodes ill for manufacturers of safety devices, the Washington Supreme Court ruled today that a cancer-stricken shipyard worker whose job was to clean respirators contaminated with asbestos could sue the respirator manufacturers for failing to warn him about the dangers of such exposure.  The case, Macias v. Saberhagen Hol ...

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral argument in Howard v. AW Chesterton, an asbestos case, on March 6. But instead of contemplating whether a mesothelioma plaintiff (John Ravert) must prove that he was exposed to the defendant companies’ asbestos products with sufficient frequency, proximity, and regularity to justify imp ...

Asbestos has amazing fire-retardent and insulating properties and was used in thousands of products for decades.  As everyone now knows, asbestos also releases microscopic fibers into the air that, when inhaled, can cause serious diseases.  For more than 40 years, people suffering from asbestos-caused illnesses have sued.  Then people who weren& ...

Plaintiffs suffering from asbestos-related diseases typically sue dozens of defendants: the manufacturers and distributors of every asbestos-containing product to which they were ever exposed, their employers, and more.  As a matter of course, the vast majority of these defendants either settle the plaintiffs’ claims, or, if they can prove t ...

Maryland’s highest court has rejected an asbestos “duty to warn” lawsuit brought by the granddaughter of a worker who, for several months in the late 1960s, worked near another worker who used products containing asbestos.  In this case, plaintiff Jocelyn Farrar was the granddaughter of John Hentgen, who worked in the constructio ...

Today, we received notice that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued a favorable per curiam opinion in Howard v. A.W. Chesterton Co. on September 26.  The issue was whether a mesothelioma patient must prove that he was exposed to the defendant companies’ asbestos products with sufficient frequency, proximity, and regularity to justify imposi ...

Tort law allows injured people to sue the person or company that caused the injury.  The question of who “caused” the injury, however, has filled volumes of legal reports.  In the context of asbestos litigation, where the companies that manufactured asbestos-containing products long ago went bankrupt, plaintiffs suffering from asbesto ...

Timothy Bostic died from mesothelioma, which he alleged was caused by his exposure to asbestos from a variety of sources, including his use of asbestos-containing joint compound manufactured by Georgia-Pacific Corporation when he was a child and teenager helping his father on weekend drywall projects.  He originally sued dozens of defendants and, ...