David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz are leftist labor and social historians in Columbia University and City University of New York, respectively. Both are frequently disclosed by plaintiffs’ counsel as expert witnesses on historical issues, and both often testify at asbestos and other personal injury trials1. Markowitz has been excluded in at least one reliability challenge2.
The two historians, who appear so often together on plaintiffs’ designations that they are sometime referred to as a unified persona, Rosnowitz, have create a website, “Project Toxicdocs,” supposedly in an alpha version3.
The Toxic Docs website does not identify Rosner and Markowitz by name as authors or sponsors, but the website’s content and goals bear their indelible stamp, as well as the concordance of their institutional affiliations of Columbia and CUNY. The website promises “[b]lazingly fast” searches and access to previously confidential, classified industry documents on “industrial poisons”:
“This dataset and website contain millions of pages of previously secret documents about toxic substances. They include secret internal memoranda, emails, slides, board minutes, unpublished scientific studies, and expert witness reports — among other kinds of documents — that emerged in recent toxic tort litigation.
Over the next couple years, we’ll be constantly adding material from lawsuits involving lead, asbestos, silica, and PCBs, among other dangerous substances. Innovations in parallel and cloud computing have made conversion of these documents into machine-readable, searchable text a far faster process than would have been the case just a decade ago.”
Similar efforts have been put into place for documents collected in tobacco and other litigations4. David Egilman, another regular testifier for the Lawsuit Industry once maintained a website with a large library of documents he relied upon for his ethics and state-of-the-art opinion testimony in various litigations.
A trial run through the “dataset” for the search term “silicosis” turned up 44 documents, most of which had nothing to do with silica or silicosis, and many of which were duplicates. Remarkably, there were no documents from government or labor unions.
We are sure that these historian expert witnesses will improve their efforts to be comprehensive and balanced, with practice.
1 See, e.g., Garcia v. Lone Star Indus., Case No. D-149, 527, 1997 WL 34904089 (Dist. Ct. Tex., Jefferson Cty., 1997) (identifying Rosner and Markowitz as testifying expert witnesses for plaintiff); City of Milwaukee v NL Industries, Inc., Circuit Ct., Milwaukee Cty., Wisc., 2007 WL 4676349 (Jan. 16, 2007) (referencing litigation report of Rosner and Markowitz); Gibson v. American Cyanamid Co., 719 F. Supp. 2d 1031, 1048 (E.D. Wis. 2010) (noting Rosner and Markowitz’s declaration for plaintiffs); Rhode Island v. Lead Industries Ass’n, C.A. No. PC 99-5226, Rhode Island Superior Court, Providence (Feb. 26, 2007) (discussing Rosner and Markowitz’s testimony on post-verdict motions); Altria Group, Inc. v. Good, No. 07-562, U.S. Sup. Ct., Amicus Brief of Allan M. Brandt, Robert N. Proctor, David M. Burns, Jonathan M. Samet, and David Rosner (June 18, 2008) (all amici except Rosner disclosed their litigation activities); Burton v. American Cyanamid Co., 775 F. Supp. 2d 1093 (E.D. Wis. 2011) (noting Rosner and Markowitz’s testimony in lead pigment case); California v. Atlantic Richfield Co., Santa Clara Super. Ct., Calif., No. 1-00-CV-788657, 2013 WL 4425657 (July 15, 2013) (noting Rosner’s testimony); Ostenrieder v. Rohm & Haas Co., Phila. Ct. C.P. Case No. 150602485, Motion in Limine to Exclude Testimony of Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner (filed by Rohm & Haas Co., subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co., June 18, 2015); Dumas v. ABB Group, Inc., civ. action no. 13-229-SLR-SRF (D. Del. Sept. 30, 2015) (referencing Rosner’s report for plaintiffs); Assenzio v. A.O. Smith Water Prods. Co., docket nos. 190008/12, 190026/12, 190200/12, 190183/12, 190184/12, NY Sup. Ct., NY Cty. (Feb. 5, 2015) (noting that Rosner testified for plaintiffs); Noll v American Biltrite, Inc., 188 Wash. App. 572, 355 P.3d 279 (Wash. Ct. App. June 29, 2015), aff’d, 355 P.3d 279 (Wash. 2015) (deposition of Gerald Markowitz given on behalf of plaintiff); Schwartz v. Honeywell Internat’l, Inc., 66 N.E.3d 118 (Ohio Ct. App. 2016) (same), app. granted, 148 Ohio St. 3d 1442, 72 N.E.3d 656 (2017); Clair v. Monsanto Co., 412 S.W.3d 295 (Mo. App. 2013) (noting Rosner as plaintiff’s expert witness); New v. Borg-Warner Corp., No. 13-cv-00675, 2015 WL 5166946 (W.D. Mo., Sept. 3, 2015) (identifying Rosner and Markowitz as plaintiff’s expert witnesses); Begin v. Air & Liquid Corp., Case No. 3:15-cv-830-SMY-DGW (S.D. Ill. May 10, 2016) (striking designation of plaintiff’s expert witness David Rosner as untimely in asbestos case); Rost v. Ford Motor Co., 151 A.3d 1032 (Pa. 2016) (noting Rosner and Markowitz as amici authors; no disclosure of litigation income); Dominick v. A.O. Smith Water Products, CA2014-000232, NY Sup. Ct., Oneida Cty., Notes of Testimony of David Rosner, Mar. 18, 2017 (Press Release from Plaintiffs’ law firm).
2 Quester v. B.F. Goodrich Co., Cuyahoga Cty., Ohio, C.P. Case No. 30-509539 (Jan. 12, 2008) (excluding Markowitz’s testimony as impermissible attempt to introduce expert witness opinion on defendants’ intent and motive).
3 Presumably an alpha version is one that has not made it to beta.
4 See “Truth Tobacco Industry Documents,” and “Tobacco Archives.”
