This week, The Wake Forest Journal of Law & Policy published six articles from its 2012 Spring Symposium, on “Toxic Tort Litigation After Milward v. Acuity Products.” The Symposium was a joint production of The Center for Progressive Reform and the Wake Forest University School of Law. The articles are now available online:
Steve C. Gold, “A Fitting Vision of Science for the Courtroom” PDF
Michael D. Green, “Pessimism About Milward” PDF
Thomas O. McGarity & Sidney A. Shapiro, “Regulator Science in Rulemaking and Tort: Unifying the Weight of the Evidence Approach,” PDF
Carl F. Cranor, “Milward v. Acuity Specialty Products: Advances in General Causation Testimony in Toxic Tort Litigation,” PDF
Joseph Sanders , “Milward v. Acuity Specialty Products Group: Constructing and Deconstructing Sciences and Law in Judicial Opinion,” PDF
Steve Baughman Jensen, “Sometimes Doubt Doesn’t Sell: A Plaintiffs’ Lawyer’s Perspective on Milward v. Acuity Products” PDF
As I noted previously, this symposium was a decidedly lopsided affair, as one might expect from its sponsorship by The Center for Progressive Reform (CPR), which speaks for the litigation industry in the United States. See “Milward Symposium Organized By Plaintiffs’ Counsel and Witnesses” (Feb. 16th, 2013).
Consistent with its sponsorship, the articles are largely cheerleading for the Milward decision. The Milward plaintiffs’ partisan expert, Carl Cranor, has a paper here, as does a plaintiffs’ lawyer prominent in ATLA/AAJ. The defense expert witnesses from Milward were not represented at the symposium in the symposium proceedings; nor were there any papers from defense counsel presented or published. Of the six published papers, only Professor Sanders adopts a somewhat neutral stance towards Milward and the First Circuit’s embrace of Weight of the Evidence in analyzing Rule 702 issues. Cf. Elizabeth Laposata, Richard Barnes, & Stanton Glantz, “Tobacco Industry Influence on the American Law Institute’s Restatements of Torts and Implications for Its Conflict of Interest Policies,” 98 Iowa L. Rev. 1 (2012) (arguing that tobacco lawyers influenced the American Law Institute’s Restatement process).
