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Everything She Just Said Was Bullshit

September 26th, 2019

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 found that the defendant’s talc and its supposed asbestos impurities were a cause of all four mesothelioma cases, and awarded compensatory damages of $37.3 million, in the cases.[2]

Johnson & Johnson was prejudiced by having to try four cases questionably consolidated together, and then hobbled by having its affirmative defense evidence stricken, and finally crucified when the trial judge instructed the jury at the end of the defense lawyer’s closing argument: “everything she just said was bullshit.”

Judge Ana C. Viscomi, who presided over the trial, struck the entire summation of defense lawyer Diane Sullivan. The action effectively deprived Johnson & Johnson of a defense, as can be seen from the verdicts. Judge Viscomi’s egregious ruling was given without explaining which parts of Sullivan’s closing were objectionable, and without giving Sullivan an opportunity to argue against the sanction.

During the course of Sullivan’s closing argument, Judge Viscomi criticized Sullivan for calling the plaintiffs’ lawyers “sinister,” and suggested that her argument was defaming the legal profession in violation of the Rules of Professional Conduct.[3] Sullivan did use the word “sinister” several times, but in each instance, she referred to the plaintiffs’ arguments, allegations, and innuendo about Johnson & Johnson’s action. Judge Viscomi curiously imputed unprofessional conduct to Sullivan for referring to plaintiffs’ counsel’s “shows and props,” as a suggestion that plaintiffs’ counsel had fabricated evidence.

Striking an entire closing argument is, as far as anyone has determined, unprecedented. Of course, Judge Haller is fondly remembered for having stricken the entirety of Vinny Gambini’s opening statement, but the good judge did allow Vinny’s “thank you” to stand:

Vinny Gambini: “Yeah, everything that guy just said is bullshit… Thank you.”

D.A. Jim Trotter: “Objection. Counsel’s entire opening statement is argument.”

Judge Chamberlain Haller: “Sustained. Counselor’s entire opening statement, with the exception of ‘Thank you’ will be stricken from the record.”

My Cousin Vinny (1992).

In the real world of a New Jersey courtroom, even Ms. Sullivan’s expression of gratitude for the jury’s attention and service succumbed to Judge Viscomi’s unprecedented ruling,[4] as did almost 40 pages of argument in which Sullivan carefully debunked and challenged the opinion testimony of plaintiffs’ highly paid expert witnesses. The trial court’s ruling undermined the defense’s detailed rebuttal of plaintiffs’ evidence, as well as the defense’s comment upon the plaintiffs’ witnesses’ lack of credibility.

Judge Viscomi’s sua sponte ruling appears even more curious given what took place in the aftermath of her instructing the jury to disregard Sullivan’s argument. First, the trial court gave very disparate treatment to plaintiffs’ counsel. The lawyers for the plaintiffs gave extensive closing arguments that were replete with assertions that Johnson & Johnson and Ms. Sullivan were liars, predators, manipulators, poisoners, baby killers, and then some. Sullivan’s objections were perfunctorily overruled. Second, Judge Viscomi permitted plaintiffs’ counsel to comment extensively upon Ms. Sullivan’s closing, even though it had been stricken. Third, despite the judicial admonition about the Rules of Professional Conduct, neither the trial judge nor plaintiffs’ counsel appear to have filed a disciplinary complaint against Ms. Sullivan. Of course, if Judge Viscomi or the plaintiffs’ counsel thought that Ms. Sullivan had violated the Rules, then they would be obligated to report Ms. Sullivan for misconduct.

Bottom line: these verdicts are unsafe.

[1]  The cases were tried in a questionable consolidation in the New Jersey Superior Court, for Middlesex County, before Judge Viscomi. Barden v. Brenntag North America, No. L-1809-17; Etheridge v. Brenntag North America, No. L-932-17; McNeill-George v. Brenntag North America, No. L-7049-16; and Ronning v. Brenntag North America, No. L-6040-17.

[2]  Bill Wichert, “J&J Hit With $37.3M Verdict In NJ Talc Case,” Law360 (Sept. 11, 2019).

[3]  Amanda Bronstad, “J&J Moves for Talc Mistrial After Judge Strikes Entire Closing Argument,” N.J.L.J. (Sept. 10, 2019) (describing Judge Viscomi as having admonished Ms. Sullivan to “[s]top denigrating the lawyers”; J&J’s motion for mistrial was made before the case was submitted to the jury).

[4]  See Peder B. Hong, “Summation at the Border: Serious Misconduct in Final Argument in Civil Trials,” 19 Hamline L. Rev. 179 (1995); Ty Tasker, “Stick and Stones: Judicial Handling of Invective in Advocacy,” 42 Judges J. 17 (2003); Janelle L. Davis, “Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, But Names Could Get Me a Mistrial: An Examination of Name-Calling in Closing Argument in Civil Cases,” 42 Gonzaga L. Rev. 133 (2011).

Posted in Asbestos, Trial Procedure | Comments Off on Everything She Just Said Was Bullshit

Sophisticated Intermediary Defense in Asbestos Cases – Use With Discretion

May 20th, 2019

“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 alleged injury is mesothelioma, and the years of exposure reach back to the 1940s. In Sawyer v. Union Carbide Corp., Foster Wheeler LLC, pleaded sophisticated intermediary and superseding cause defenses “pro forma,” in a mesothelioma case that involved asbestos exposure from 1948 through the 1970s.[1] Plaintiff moved for partial summary judgment on these two defenses, but rather than withdraw the defenses, Foster Wheeler attempted to present evidentiary support in the form of the employer’s (purchaser’s) knowledge of asbestos hazards. The employer was the Bethlehem Steel Company, at the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point Shipyard.

Foster Wheeler certainly was able to show that Bethlehem Steel was aware of the hazards of asbestosis, going back to 1948. If the plaintiff’s alleged injury had been asbestosis, the employer’s knowledge should have sufficed. The injury alleged, however, was mesothelioma. Evidence that the Maritime Commission had warned Bethlehem Steel about the hazards of asbestosis, and to maintain a threshold limit value of 5 million particles per cubic foot, was not particularly germane or helpful in avoiding mesothelioma among employees.

Moving forward two decades, Foster Wheeler was able to show that Bethlehem Steel’s Medical Director, Dr. Paul J. Whitaker, was well aware of the connection between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma, in 1968.[2] This evidence, however, left two decades of exposure, from 1948 to 1968, in which Foster Wheeler had not shown its purchaser was aware of the risk of mesothelioma.

The trial court in Sawyer, however, did not focus on the differential between an asbestosis and a mesothelioma hazard. Instead of noting the lack of knowledge with respect to mesothelioma, the trial court insisted that the supplier must have subjective awareness of the purchaser’s actual knowledge of the relevant hazards. Even the overwhelming evidence of Bethlehem’s awareness of asbestosis hazards throughout the plaintiff’s employment was thus, questionably, deemed irrelevant.

According the trial court, the sophisticated intermediary defense focuses on what “focuses on what the product manufacturer knew and the reasonableness of its reliance on the employer prior to and during the time the workers were exposed.”[3] The Sawyer court took this focus to require a showing that the defendant had actual awareness of the intermediary’s knowledge of the dangers of asbestos exposure. According to the decision, Foster Wheeler failed to establish a basis for having such actual knowledge of Bethlehem Steel’s knowledge.

The Sawyer court’s insistence upon actual awareness is not supported by its citation to the Restatement (Second) of Torts. The relevant provision for sales of products to be used by a third party states that[4]:

“One who supplies directly or through a third person a chattel for another to use is subject to liability to those whom the supplier should expect to use the chattel with the consent of the other or to be endangered by its probable use, for physical harm caused by the use of the chattel in the manner for which and by a person for whose use it is supplied, if the supplier

  • knows or has reason to know that the chattel is or is likely to be dangerous for the use for which it is supplied, and
  • has no reason to believe that those for whose use the chattel is supplied will realize its dangerous condition, and
  • fails to exercise reasonable care to inform them of its dangerous condition or of the facts which make it likely to be dangerous.”

The Restatement’s articulated standard does not call for the seller’s subjective awareness as a necessary condition. Having a reason to believe the user will realize its dangerous condition seems eminently satisfied by a generalized, reasonable belief that purchasers are sophisticated with respect to the product’s use. Foster Wheeler might have improved its evidentiary showing in opposition to plaintiff’s motion, however, by adverting to its own knowledge that there was a prevalent regulatory scheme, including the Walsh-Healy Act, which covered the safety of workers in the use of asbestos. As noted above, this knowledge would not have implicated the hazard of mesothelioma or the means to avoid it in purchasers’ workplaces.

The Sawyer decision offered virtually no support for the proposition that the seller, wishing to avail itself of the sophisticated intermediary defense, must have actual knowledge of the buyer’s awareness of the relevant hazard. Failure to warn liability for a product’s harm is predicated upon negligence law. Almost all civilized jurisdictions require plaintiff to show negligence in such cases.[5] The test for non-obviousness such that a warning might be required under the law is an objective one, which does not turn on the user’s actual knowledge of the hazard.[6]

Although standing on the sophisticated intermediary defense may have been improvident in Sawyer, there are many cases that cry out for dismissal on the strength of the defense. The facts of silica cases, for example, are radically different from early exposure asbestos cases because of the wide diffusion and general equality of knowledge of silica hazards throughout industry, labor, and government.[7]  The dangers of occupational exposure to crystalline silica were so well known that the New York Court of Appeals recognized, seventy years ago, that “[i]t is a matter of common knowledge that it is injurious to the lungs and dangerous to health to work in silica dust.”[8] This pervasiveness of knowledge about the potential hazards of industrial silica exposure has been the basis for many dispositive rulings in silica cases, even when the sellers lacked subjective awareness of the buyer’s state of mind.[9]

Product liability is defined and bounded by the scope of an essential need for warnings in the face of imbalances in knowledge between seller and buyer. When the rationale is not or cannot be satisfied, ignoring the sophisticated intermediary’s knowledge is little more than creating a “duty to pay.” In the context of industrial sales of materials and products to large, sophisticated buyers, the law recognizes that warnings are often unnecessary and even counter-productive when hazards of the materials or products are known to the buyers as well as, if not better than, to the sellers. The so-called sophisticated intermediary defense thus reflects nothing more than the rational limits of liability in situations when the chattel is widely known to be hazardous, and the seller can reasonably rely upon the intermediary to be aware of the hazard and to protect down-stream users, typically employees of the purchaser.

Because of the shift in knowledge about the causal relationship between amphibole asbestos and mesothelioma, asbestos product cases would appear unlikely applications for sophisticated intermediary defenses, at least until the knowledge of mesothelioma hazards became widely prevalent. Because of the  change in the state of the art with respect to asbestos hazards, asbestos cases involve substantial factual and legal differences from other hazardous material cases. The singular facts of some of the asbestos cases include an extreme imbalance between supplier and some purchasers in their respective knowledge of asbestos hazards. Accordingly, jurisdictions that have embraced the sophisticated intermediary defense have thus treated asbestos cases, with pre-OSHA exposures, differently from other occupational exposure cases.[10]

The OSH Act of 1970, which created OSHA, was fueled in large part by wide-spread awareness and concern about asbestos exposure and occupational cancers, such as mesothelioma. In asbestos cases involving only post-1969 asbestos exposures, courts have upheld the applicability of the sophisticated intermediary defense. Thus a federal trial court in Kentucky, applying Indiana law, granted summary judgment to a respirator manufacturer, on the basis of the sophisticated intermediary defense, in a post-OSHA asbestos lung cancer case.[11] Similarly, a Virginia state trial court, notwithstanding the application of Virginia law in the Willis and Oman federal cases upheld the sophisticated intermediary defense as a complete legal defense for asbestos sales after 1970.[12] The decisions in these asbestos cases with only post-1970 asbestos exposure emphasized the equality of knowledge of asbestos hazards, which distinguished them from earlier asbestos cases involving companies such as Johns-Manville, which had been found to suppress or hide information from purchasers and workers.[13]

[1] Sawyer v. Union Carbide Corp., Civil No. CCB-16-118, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 72215 at *33; 2019 WL 1904882 (D. Md. April 29, 2019).

[2] Sawyer at *36.

[3] Sawyer at *36 (quoting Willis v. Raymark Indus., Inc., 905 F.2d 793, 797 (4th Cir. 1990)).

[4]  § 388 Chattel Known to Be Dangerous for Intended Use, Restatement (Second) of Torts (1965).

[5] Under New York law, for instance, the duty to warn in strict liability is identical in nature and scope as the duty in negligence. Martin v. Hacker, 83 N.Y. 1, 8 n.1 (1993). New York law acknowledges that there is no meaningful distinction between negligent and strict liability failure to warn claims. See Fane v. Zimmer, Inc., 927 F.2d 124, 130 (2d Cir. 1991) (New York law) (“Failure to warn claims purporting to sound in strict liability and those sounding in negligence are essentially the same.”). See also Rainbow v. Albert Elia Bldg. Co., 49 A.D.2d 250 (4th Dept. 1974) (distinguishing manufacturing and design defects, and permitting “reasonableness” defenses, including state-of-the-art defenses, to the latter in strict products liability), aff’d, 56 N.Y.2d 550 (1981). On the equivalence between negligence and product liability for failure to warn, New York law is aligned with the law of most states. See Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability § 2, and comment I (1998); Restatement (Second) of Torts § 388 & comment n (1965); Restatement (First) of Torts § 388, comment 1 (1934).

[6] The standard for the open and obvious defense, which is many respects is a variant of the sophisticated intermediary defense, is an objective one, based on what would be obvious to the ordinary person. See Plante v. Hobart Corp., 771 F.2d 617, 620 (1st Cir. 1985) (“Where the danger involved in using a product is obvious and apparent, discernible by casual inspection, a supplier is not negligent in failing to warn of that danger.”); Fleck v. KDI Sylvan Pools, Inc., 981 F.2d 107, 119 (3d Cir. 1992) (“[W]hether a danger is open and obvious is an objective inquiry, not dependent upon the actual knowledge of the user or his actual awareness of the danger.”); Glittenberg v. Doughboy, 491 N.W.2d 208, 213 (Mich. 1992) (“Determination of the ‘obvious’ character of a product- connected danger is objective.”).

[7] See Linda Regis, “Frame the Sandbox to Sandblasting: Regulation of Crystalline Silica,” 17 Pace Envt’l L. Rev. 207, 208 n. 8 (1999); Richard Ausness, “Learned Intermediaries and Sophisticated Users: Encouraging the Use of Intermediaries to Transmit Product Safety Information,” 46 Syracuse L. Rev. 1185, 1205-07 (1996); Kenneth Willner, “Failures to Warn and the Sophisticated User Defense,” 74 Va. L. Rev. 579 (1988); Victor Schwartz & Russell Driver, “Warnings in the Workplace: The Need for a Synthesis of Law and Communication Theory,” 52 U. Cin. L. Rev. 38 (1983).

[8] Sadowski v. Long Island RR., 292 N.Y. 448, 456 (1944) (emphasis added). A few years later, the United States Supreme Court concurred and quoted Sadowski. Urie v. Tompkins, 337 U.S. 163, 190 (1949).

[9] See, e.g., Goodbar v. Whitehead Bros., 591 F. Supp. 552 (W.D. Va. 1984), aff’d sub nom. Beale v. Hardy, 769 F.2d 213 (4th Cir. 1985); Smith v. Walter C. Best, Inc., 927 F.2d 736 (3d Cir. 1990) (applying Ohio law in a silica foundry case); Bergfeld v. Unimin Corp., 319 F.3d 350 (8th Cir. 2003) (applying Iowa law to affirm summary judgment); Haase v. Badger Mining Corp., 266 Wis. 2d 970 (Wis. Ct. App. 2003), aff’d, 274 Wis. 2d 143 (2004); Damond v. Avondale Industries, 718 So. 2d 551 (La. App. 1998) (affirming summary judgment for a silica supplier on a worker’s claims for silicosis from sandblasting, which if not done carefully, can be an extremely hazardous); Cowart v. Avondale Indus., 792 So. 2d 73 (La. Ct. App. 2001) (holding that the sophisticated user defense was dispositive in a foundry workplace, which was sophisticated about the potential hazards of its silica use); Bates v. E.D. Bullard Co., 76 So.3d 111 (La.App. 2011) (affirming summary judgment for silica suppliers); Phillips v. A.P. Green Refractories Co., 428 Pa. Super. 167, 630 A.2d 874 (1993), aff’d on other grounds, Phillips v. A-Best Products Co., 542 Pa. 124, 665 A.2d 1167 (1995) (lack of proximate cause for claimed failure to warn).

[10] Virginia law, which governed the Willis case cited by the Sawyer court is illustrative. Compare Oman v. Johns-Manville Corp., 764 F.2d 224 (4th Cir. 1985) (applying Virginia law, which embraces § 388, but refusing to apply the doctrine because the employer was unaware of asbestos hazards during plaintiffs’ employment before 1964), cert. denied sub nom. Oman v. H.K. Porter, 474 U.S. 970 (1985), with Beale v. Hardy, 469 F.2d 213 (4th Cir. 1985) (holding that Section 388 was a complete defense in silicosis cases under Virginia law). Michigan, another industrialized state with well-developed case law, also illustrates the disparate treatment of asbestos cases. Compare Russo v. Abex Corp., 670 F. Supp. 206, 208 (E.D. Mich. 1987) (holding that “asbestos-containing product manufacturers have an absolute duty to warn because of the unique and patent dangers of asbestos”) with Jodway v. Kennametal, Inc., 207 Mich. App. 622, 525 N.W.2d 883 (Mich. Ct. App. 1994) (applying Section 388 in hard-metal (cobalt) lung disease case); Kudzia v. Carboloy Division, 190 Mich. App. 285, 475N.W.2d 371 (1991) (same), aff’d, 439 Mich. 923, 479 N.W.2d 679 (1992); Tasca v. GTE Products Corp., 175 Mich. App. 617, 438 N.W.2d 625 (Mich. Ct. of App. 1989) (same). See also Antcliff v. State Employees Credit Union, 414 Mich. 624, 640 (1982); Ross v. Jaybird Automation, Inc., 172 Mich. App. 603, 607 (1988); Rasmussen v. Louisville Ladder Co., Inc., 211 Mich. App. 541, 547-48 (1995); Portelli v. I.R. Construction Products Co., 218 Mich. App. 591, 599 (1996); Mills v. Curioni, 238 F. Supp. 876, 894-96 (E.D. Mich. 2002).

[11] Triplett v. Minnesota Mining & Mfg. Co., 422 F. Supp. 2d 779 (W.D. Ky. 2006).

[12] Bean v. Asbestos Corporation, Ltd., 1998 WL 972122 (Va. Cir. Ct. 1998).

[13] See also Gottschall v. General Electric Co., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 151563 (E.D. Pa. Dec. 8, 2011) (MDL 875) (California law; granting summary judgment when the Navy’s knowledge of asbestos hazards was equal to that of defendant), rev’d, No. 14-15379, 14-15380, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 17248 (9th Cir. 2016).

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Apportionment and Pennsylvania’s Fair Share Act

March 14th, 2019

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 joint and several liability in favor of apportionment of shares among multiple defendants, including settled defendants.1

Although the statute stated the general rule in terms of negligence,2 the Act was clearly intended to apply to actions for so-called strict liability:3

“(1) Where recovery is allowed against more than one person, including actions for strict liability, and where liability is attributed to more than one defendant, each defendant shall be liable for that proportion of the total dollar amount awarded as damages in the ratio of the amount of that defendant’s liability to the amount of liability attributed to all defendants and other persons to whom liability is apportioned under subsection.”

The intended result of the legislation was for courts to enter separate and several judgments against defendants held liable in the amount apportioned to each defendant’s liability.4 The Act created exceptions for for intentional torts and for cases in which a defendant receives 60% or greater share in the apportionment.5

In Pennsylvania, as in other states, judges sometimes fall prey to the superstition that the law, procedural and substantive, does not apply to asbestos cases. Roverano v. John Crane, Inc., is an asbestos case in which the plaintiff claimed his lung cancer was caused by exposure to multiple defendants’ products. The trial judge, falling under the sway of asbestos exceptionalism, refused to apply Fair Share Act, suggesting that “the jury was not presented with evidence that would permit an apportionment to be made by it.”

The Roverano trial judge’s suggestion is remarkable, given that any plaintiff is exposed to different asbestos products in distinguishable amounts, and for distinguishable durations. Furthermore, asbestos products have distinguishable, relative levels of friability, with different levels of respirable fiber exposure for the plaintiff. In some cases, the products contain different kinds of asbestos minerals, which have distinguishable and relative levels of potency to cause the plaintiff’s specific disease. Asbestos cases, whether involving asbestosis, lung cancer, or mesothelioma claims, are more amenable to apportionment of shares among co-defendants than are “red car / blue car” cases.

Pennsylvania’s intermediate appellate court reversed the trial court’s asbestos exceptionalism, and held that upon remand, the court must:

“[a]pply a non-per capita allocation to negligent joint tortfeasors and strict liability joint tortfeasors; and permit evidence of settlements reached between plaintiffs and bankrupt entities to be included in the calculation of allocation of liability.”

Roverano v. John Crane, 2017 Pa. Super. 415, 177 A.3d 892 (2017).

The Superior Court’s decision did not sit well with the litigation industry, which likes joint and several liability, with equal shares. Joint and several liability permits plaintiffs’ counsel to extort large settlements from minor defendants who face the prospect of out-sized pro rata shares after trial, without the benefit of reductions for the shares of settled bankrupt defendants. The Roverano plaintiff appealed from the Superior Court’s straightforward application of a remedial statute.

What should be a per curiam affirmance of the Superior Court, however, could result in another act of asbestos exceptionalism by Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Media reports of the oral argument in Roverano suggest that several of the justices invoked the specter of “junk science” in apportioning shares among asbestos co-defendants.6 Disrespectfully, Justice Max Baer commented:

“Respectfully, your theory is interjecting junk science. We’ve never held that duration of contact corresponds with culpability.”7

The Pennsylvania Justices’ muddle can be easily avoided. First, the legislature clearly expressed its intention that apportionment be permitted in strict liability cases.

Second, failure-to-warn strict liability cases are, as virtually all scholars and most courts recognize, essentially negligence cases, in any event.8

Third, apportionment is a well-recognized procedure in the law of Torts, including the Pennsylvania law of torts. Apportionment of damages among various causes was recognized in the Restatement of Torts (Second) Section 433A (Apportionment of Harm to Causes), which specifies that:

(1) Damages for harm are to be apportioned among two or more causes where

(a) there are distinct harms, or

(b) there is a reasonable basis for determining the contribution of each cause to a single harm.

Restatement (Second) of Torts § 433A(1) (1965) [hereinafter cited as Section 433A].

The comments to Section 433A suggest a liberal application for apportionment. The rules set out in Section 433A apply “whenever two or more causes have combined to bring about harm to the plaintiff, and each has been a substantial factor in producing the harm … .”

Id., comment a. The independent causes may be tortious or innocent, “and it is immaterial whether all or any of such persons are joined as defendants in the particular action.” Id. Indeed, apportionment also applies when the defendant’s conduct combines “with the operation of a force of nature, or with a pre-existing condition which the defendant has not caused, to bring about the harm to the plaintiff.” Just as the law of grits applies in everyone’s kitchen, the law of apportionment applies in Pennsylvania courts.

Apportionment of damages is an accepted legal principle in Pennsylvania law. Martin v. Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp., 515 Pa. 377, 528 A.2d 947 (1987). Courts, applying Pennsylvania law, have permitted juries to apportion damages between asbestos and cigarette smoking as causal factors in plaintiffs’ lung cancers, based upon a reasonable basis for determining the contribution of each source of harm to a single harm.9

In Parker, none of the experts assigned exact mathematical percentages to the probability that asbestos rather than smoking caused the lung cancer. The Court of Appeals noted that on the record before it:

“we cannot say that no reasonable basis existed for determining the contribution of cigarette smoking to the cancer suffered by the decedent.”10

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has itself affirmed the proposition that “liability attaches to a negligent act only to the degree that the negligent act caused the employee’s injury.”11 Thus, even in straight-up negligence cases, causal apportionment must play in a role, even when the relative causal contributions are much harder to determine than in the quasi-quantitative setting of an asbestos exposure claim.

Let’s hope that Justice Baer and his colleagues read the statute and the case law before delivering judgment. The first word in the name of the legislation is Fair.

1 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 7102.

2 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 7102(a)

3 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 7102(a)(1) (emphasis added).

4 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 7102(a)(2).

5 42 Pa.C.S.A. § 7102 (a)(3)(ii), (iii).

7 Id. (quoting Baer, J.).

8 See, e.g, Restatement (Third) of Torts: Products Liability § 2, and comment I (1998); Fane v. Zimmer, Inc., 927 F.2d 124, 130 (2d Cir. 1991) (“Failure to warn claims purporting to sound in strict liability and those sounding in negligence are essentially the same.”).

9 Parker v. Bell Asbestos Mines, No. 86-1197, unpublished slip op. at 5 (3d Cir., Dec. 30, 1987) (per curiam) (citing Section 433A as Pennsylvania law, and Martin v. Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. , 515 Pa. 377, 528 A.2d 947, 949 (1987))

10 Id. at 7.

11 Dale v. Baltimore & Ohio RR., 520 Pa. 96, 106, 552 A.2d 1037, 1041 (1989). See also McAllister v. Pennsylvania RR., 324 Pa. 65, 69-70, 187 A. 415, 418 (1936) (holding that plaintiff’s impairment, and pain and suffering, can be apportioned between two tortious causes; plaintiff need not separate damages with exactitude); Shamey v. State Farm Mutual Auto. Ins. Co., 229 Pa. Super. 215, 223, 331 A.2d 498, 502 (1974) (citing, and relying upon, Section 433A; difficulties in proof do not constitute sufficient reason to hold a defendant liable for the damage inflicted by another person). Pennsylvania law is in accord with the law of other states as well, on apportionment. See Waterson v. General Motors Corp., 111 N.J. 238, 544 A.2d 357 (1988) (holding that a strict liability claim against General Motors for an unreasonably dangerous product defect was subject to apportionment for contribution from failing to wear a seat belt) (the jury’s right to apportion furthered the public policy of properly allocating the costs of accidents and injuries).

Posted in Apportionment, Asbestos, Causation, Trial Procedure | Comments Off on Apportionment and Pennsylvania’s Fair Share Act

Selikoff Timeline & Asbestos Litigation History

December 20th, 2018

This post has been updated here.

Posted in Asbestos, Expert Witnesses, Historian Testimony | Comments Off on Selikoff Timeline & Asbestos Litigation History

Castleman-Selikoff – Can Their Civil Conspiracy Survive Death?

December 4th, 2018

Several, years ago, I wrote about Barry Castleman’s 1979 memorandum to Irving Selikoff, in which Castleman implored Selikoff to refuse to cooperate with lawful discovery from defense counsel in asbestos personal injury cases. The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011). The document, titled “Defense Attorneys’ Efforts to Use Background Files of Selikoff-Hammond Studies to Avert Liability,” was dated November 5, 1979. Coming from The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, created by litigation industry’s tobacco subsidiary, the document is clearly authentic. Barry Castleman, however, has testified that he cannot remember the 35+ year old memorandum, which failure of recall is not probative of anything.1  He refuses to renounce his role as a co-conspirator.

Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale have both made careers of attacking any manufacturing and mining industry with connections to asbestos, while supporting the litigation industry that thrives on asbestos. Sadly, Jock McCulloch died of mesothelioma, earlier this year, on January 18, 2018, in Australia. McCulloch attributed his disease to his exposure to crocidolite when he researched one of his books on blue asbestos in South Africa.2 Although I found his scholarship biased and exaggerated, I admired his tenacious zeal in pressing his claims. His candor about the cause of his last illness was exemplary compared with Selikoff’s failure to acknowledge the extent to which amosite and crocidolite were used in the United States.

In 2007, Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale wrote an article in which they attacked those who dared to say anything negative about Irving Selikoff.3 Of course, in claiming that the asbestos industry was “shooting the messenger,” these authors were, well, shooting the messenger, too. In 2008, McCulloch and Tweedale wrote a much more interesting, hagiographic article about Selikoff.4 From the legal perpective, perhaps the most interesting revelation in this article was that the authors had drawn “upon unprecedented access to the Selikoff archive at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.”

Several years later, defense counsel in the United States attempted to visit the Selikoff archives at Mt. Sinai Hospital. After an unseemly delay, the inquisitive counsel were met with unprecedented obstruction and denial of access:

From: [ARCHIVIST]
To: [DEFENSE COUNSEL]
Subject: Request for appointment with Archivist
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2014 16:18:53 +0000

I realize that this must seem out of the blue, but we have recently realized that the stub email address we have – msarchives – has not been forwarding email the way it was intended to do. I apologize for not responding to you previously, and for what it is worth, here is the answer to your question.

Some Selikoff material in the Mount Sinai Archives, although I believe some of his research material is still with our Dept. of Preventive Medicine. Our collection is currently closed to researchers, as per the request of Mount Sinai’s Legal Department in 2009. Here is their statement concerning these records:

It was agreed that Dr. Selikoff’s correspondence and archives that are kept within the auspices of the MSSM library under the direction of the MSSM archivist, Barbara Niss, would be kept confidential for at least an additional 25 years to protect Dr. Selikoff’s research endeavors and the privacy of all the individuals, particularly the research subjects, who he studied and with whom he communicated. It is anticipated that twenty-five years from now, these individuals will no longer be alive and their concerns about keeping these matters private will have become moot. However, if we determine that this is not the case, we will reserve the option to continue to keep these documents confidential. We are also taking this action to preserve the academic freedom of our researchers so they can pursue their research, communicate with colleagues and comment on these important environmental/scientific issues, without concerns that they will be subpoenaed as non-party witnesses in these massive tort litigations.

Again, my apologies for the very late reply. Please let me know if you have questions.

So there you have it, 35 years after Castleman implored Selikoff not to cooperate with lawyers’ proper fact discovery, the Selikoff archive is still at its obstruction and denial.

1 See “The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011). In 2014, Castleman testifies that he has no recollection of the memorandum. The document was also available at Scribd.

2 See Laurie Kazan-Allen, “In Memory of Jock McCulloch” (Jan. 21, 2018) (quoting an email from Jock McCulloch, dated July 21, 2017: “The injury almost certainly occurred while I was researching Asbestos Blues in South Africa, which is all of twenty years ago.”); “Remembering Jock McCulloch,” Toxic Docs Blog (Jan. 28, 2018) (quoting his partner’s tribute about the cause of his death: “His exposure to blue asbestos was probably in South Africa during the mid-1990s, when he was researching a book on the history of mining.”).

3 Jock McCulloch & Geoffrey Tweedale, “Shooting the Messenger: The Vilification of Irving J. Selikoff,” 37 Internat’l J. Health Services 619 (2007).

4 Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale, “Science is not Sufficient: Irving J. Selikoff and the Asbestos Tragedy,” 17 New Solutions 293 (2008).

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“Each and Every Exposure” Is a Substantial Factor

December 3rd, 2018

“Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings”
… It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Every time a plaintiff shows the smallest imaginable exposure, there is a full recovery.
… The American tort system.

 

In 1984, Philadelphia County had a non-jury system for asbestos personal injury cases, with a right to “appeal” for a de novo trial with a jury. The non-jury trials were a wonderful training ground for a generation of trial lawyers, and for a generation or two of testifying expert witnesses. When I started to try asbestos cases as a young lawyer, the plaintiffs’ counsel had already taught their expert witnesses to include the “each and every exposure” talismanic language in their direct examination testimonies on the causation of the plaintiffs’ condition. The litigation industry had figured out that this expression would help avoid a compulsory non-suit on proximate causation.

Back in those wild, woolly frontier days, I encountered the slick Dr. Joseph Sokolowski (“Sok”), a pulmonary physician in private practice in New Jersey. Sok, like many other pulmonary physicians in the Delaware Valley area, had seen civilian workers referred by Philadelphia Naval Shipyard to be evaluated for asbestosis. When the plaintiff-friendly physicians diagnosed asbestosis, a few preferred firms would then pursue their claims under the Federal Employees Compensation Act (FECA). The United States government would notify the workers of their occupational disease, and urge them to pursue the government’s outside vendors of asbestos-containing materials, with a reminder that the government had a lien against any civil action recovery. The federal government thus made common cause with the niche law practices of workers’ compensation lawyers,1 and helped launch the tsunami of asbestos litigation.2

Sok was perfect for his role in the federal kick-back scheme. He could deliver the most implausible testimony, and weather brutal cross-examination without flinching. He had the face of a choir boy, and his service as an outside examiner for the Navy Yard employees gave his diagnoses the apparent imprimatur of the federal government. Although Sok had no real understanding of epidemiology, he could readily master the Selikoff litany of 5-10-50, for relative risks for lung cancer, from asbestos alone (supposedly), from smoking alone, and from asbestos and smoking combined, respectively. And he similarly mastered his lines that “each and every exposure” is substantial, when pressed on whether and how exposure to a minor vendor’s product was a substantial factor. Back in those days, before Johns-Manville (JM) Corporation went bankrupt, honest witnesses at the Navy Yard acknowledged that JM supplied the vast majority of asbestos products, but that testimony changed literally over the course of a trial day, when the plaintiffs’ bar learned of the JM bankruptcy.

It was into this topsy-turvy litigation world, I was thrown. I had the sense that there was no basis for the “each and every exposure” opinion, but my elders at the defense bar seemed to avoid the opinion studiously on cross-examination. I recall co-defendants’ counsels’ looks of horror and disapproval when I broached the topic in my first cross-examination. Sok had known to incorporate the “each and every exposure” opinion into his direct testimony, but he had no intelligible response to my question about what possible basis there was for the opinion. “Well, we have to blame each and every exposure because we have no way distinguish among exposures.” I could not let it lie there, and so I asked: “So your opinion about each and every exposure is based upon your ignorance?” My question was quickly met with an objection, and just as quickly with a rather loud and disapproving, “Sustained!” When Sok finished his testimony, I moved to strike his substantial factor opinion as having no foundation, but my motion was met with by judicial annoyance and apathy.

And so I learned that science and logic had nothing to do with asbestos litigation. Some determined defense counsel persevered, however, and in the face of over one hundred bankruptcies,3 a few courts started to take the evidence and arguments against the “every exposure” testimony, seriously. Last week, the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, agreed to state out loud that the plaintiffs’ “every exposure” theory had no clothes, no foundation, and no science. Juni v. A.O. Smith Water Products Co., No. 123, N.Y. Court of Appeals (Nov. 27, 2018).4

In a short, concise opinion, with a single dissent, the Court held that plaintiffs’ evidence (any exposure, no matter how trivial) in a mesothelioma death case was “insufficient as a matter of law to establish that respondent Ford Motor Co.’s conduct was a proximate cause of the decedent’s injuries.” The ruling affirmed the First Department’s affirmance of a trial court’s judgment notwithstanding the $11 million jury verdict against Ford.5 Arguing for the proposition that every exposure is substantial, over three dozen scientists, physicians, and historians, most of whom regularly support and testify for the litigation industry, filed a brief in support of the plaintiffs.6 The Atlantic Legal Foundation filed an amicus brief on behalf of several scientists,7 and I had the privilege of filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Coalition for Litigation Justice and nine other organizations in support of Ford’s positions.8

It has been 34 years since I first encountered the “every exposure is substantial” dogma in a Philaddelphia courtroom. Some times in litigation, it takes a long time to see the truth come out.

1 E.g., Shein and Brookman; Greitzer & Locks; both of Philadelphia.

2 Encouraging litigation against its suppliers, the federal government pulled off a coup of misdirection. First, it deflected public censure from the Navy and other governmental branches for its own carelessness in the use, installation, and removal of asbestos-containing insulations. Second, the government winnowed the ranks of older, better compensated workers. Third, and most diabolically, the government, which was self-insured for FECA claims, recovered most of their outlay when its former employees recovered judgments or settlements against the government’s outside asbestos product vendors. “The United States Government’s Role in the Asbestos Mess” (Jan. 31, 2012). See also Walter Olson, “Asbestos awareness pre-Selikoff,” Point of Law (Oct. 19, 2007); “The U.S. Navy and the asbestos calamity” Point of Law (Oct. 9, 2007).

4 The plaintiffs were represented by Alani Golanski of Weitz & Luxenberg LLP.

6 Abby Lippman, Annie Thebaud Mony, Arthur L. Frank, Barry Castleman, Bruce P. Lanphear,

Celeste Monforton, Colin L. Soskolne, Daniel Thau Teitelbaum, Dario Consonni, Dario Mirabelli, David Egilman, David F. Goldsmith, David Ozonoff, David Rosner, Fiorella Belpoggi, James Huff, John Heinzow, John M. Dement, John Coulter Maddox, Karl T. Kelsey, Kathleen Ruff, Kenneth D. Rosenman, L. Christine Oliver, Laura Welch, Leslie Thomas Stayner, Morris Greenberg, Nachman Brautbar, Philip J. Landrigan, Xaver Baur, Hans-Joachim Woitowitz, Bice Fubini, Richard Kradin, T.K. Joshi, Theresa S. Emory, Thomas H. Gassert,

Tony Fletcher, and Yv Bonnier Viger.

7 John Henderson Duffus, Ronald E. Gots, Arthur M. Langer, Robert Nolan, Gordon L. Nord, Alan John Rogers, and Emanuel Rubin.

8 Amici Curiae Brief of Coalition for Litigation Justice, Inc., Business Council of New York State, Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, New York Insurance Association, Inc., Northeast Retail Lumber Association, National Association of Manufacturers, Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A., American Tort Reform Association, American Insurance Association, and NFIB Small Business Legal Center Supporting Defendant-Respondent Ford Motor Company.

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Cartoon Advocacy for Causal Claims

October 5th, 2018

I saw him today at the courthouse
On his table was a sawed-in-half man
He was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by his blood-stained hands
Ah yeah! Yeah1

Mark Lanier’s Deceptive Cartoon Advocacy

A recent book by Kurt Andersen details the extent of American fantasy, in matters religious, political, and scientific.2 Andersen’s book is a good read and a broad-ranging dissection of the American psyche for cadswallop. The book has one gaping hole, however. It completely omits the penchant for fantasy in American courtrooms.

Ideally, the trial lawyers in a case balance each other and their distractions drop out of the judge or jury’s search for the truth. Sometimes, probably too frequently in so-called toxic tort cases, plaintiffs’ counsel’s penchant for fantasy is so great and persistent that it overwhelms the factfinder’s respect for the truth, and results in an unjust award. In a telling article in Forbes, Mr. Daniel Fisher has turned his sights upon plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Lanier and his role in helping a jury deliver a $5 billion (give or take a few shekels).3

The $5 billion verdict came in the St. Louis, Missouri, courtroom of Judge Rex Burlison, who presided over a multi-plaintiff case in which the plaintiffs claimed that they had developed ovarian cancer from using Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder. In previous trials, plaintiffs’ counsel and expert witnesses attempted to show that talc itself could cause ovarian cancer, with inconsistent jury results. Mr. Lanier took a different approach in claiming that the talcum powder was contaminated with asbestos, which caused his clients to develop ovarian cancer.

The asserted causal relationship between occupational or personal exposure to talc and ovarian cancer is tenuous at best, but there is at least a debatable issue about the claimed association between occupational asbestos use and ovarian cancer. The more thoughtful reviews of the issue, however, are cautious in noting that disease outcome misclassification (misdiagnosing mesotheliomas that would be expected in these occupational cohorts with ovarian cancer) make conclusions difficult. See, e.g., Alison Reid, Nick de Klerk and Arthur W. (Bill) Musk, “Does Exposure to Asbestos Cause Ovarian Cancer? A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-analysis,” 20 Cancer Epidemiol. Biomarkers & Prevention 1287 (2011).

Fisher reported that Lanier, after obtaining the $5 billion verdict, presented to a litigation industry meeting, held at a plush Napa Valley resort. In this presentation, Lanier described his St. Louis achievement by likening himself to a magician, and explained “how I sawed the man in half.” Of course, if Lanier had sawed the man in half, he would be a murderer, and the principle of charity requires us to believe that he is merely a purveyor of magical thinking, a deceiver, practiced in the art of deception.

Lanier’s boast about his magical skills is telling. The whole point of the magician’s act is to thrill an audience by the seemingly impossible suspension of the laws of nature. Deception, of course, is the key to success for a magician, or an illusionist of any persuasion. It is comforting to think that Lanier regards himself as an illusionist because his self-characterization suggests that he does not really believe in his own courtroom illusions.

Lanier’s magical thinking and acts have gotten him into trouble before. Fisher noted that Lanier had been branded as deceptive by the second highest court in the United States, the United States Court of Appeals, in Christopher v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., Nos. 16-11051, et al., 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 10476 (5th Cir. April 25, 2018). In Christopher, Lanier had appeared to engineer payments to expert witnesses in a way that he thought he could tell the jury that the witnesses had no pecuniary interest in the case. Id. at *67. The Court noted that “[l]awyers cannot engage with a favorable expert, pay him ‘for his time’, then invite him to testify as a purportedly ‘non-retained’ neutral party. That is deception, plain and simple.” Id. at *67. The Court concluded that “Lanier’s deceptions furnish[ed] independent grounds for a new trial, id. at *8, because Lanier’s “deceptions [had] obviously prevented defendants from ‘fully and fairly’ defending themselves.” Id. at *69.

Cartoon Advocacy

In his presentation to the litigation industry meeting in Napa Valley, Lanier explained that “Every judge lives by certain rules, just like in sports, but every stadium is also allowed to size themselves appropriately to the game.” See Fisher at note 3. Lanier’s magic act thrives in courtrooms where anything goes. And apparently, Lanier was telling his litigation industry audience that anything goes in the St. Louis courtroom of Judge Burlison.

In some of the ovarian cancer cases, Lanier had a problem: the women had a BrCa2 deletion mutation, which put them at a very high lifetime risk of ovarian cancer, irrespective of what exogenous exposures they may have had. Lanier was undaunted by this adverse evidence, and he spun a story that these women were at the edge of a cliff, when evil Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder came along and pushed them over the cliff:

Lanier Exhibit (from Fisher’s article in Forbes)

Whatever this cartoon lacks in artistic ability, we should give the magician his due; this is a powerful rhetorical metaphor, but it is not science. If it were, there would be a study that showed that ovarian cancers occurred more often in women with BrCa 2 mutations and talcum exposure than in women with BrCa 2 mutations without talcum exposure. The cartoon also imputes an intention to harm specific plaintiffs, which is not supported by the evidence. Lanier’s argument about the “edge of the cliff” does not change the scientific or legal standard that the alleged harm be the sine qua non of the tortious exposure. In the language of the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Torts4:

“An actor’s tortious conduct must be a factual cause of another’s physical harm for liability to be imposed. Conduct is a factual cause of harm when the harm would not have occurred absent the conduct.”

Lanier’s cartoon also mistakes risk, if risk it should be, with cause in fact. Reverting back to basic principles, Kenneth Rothman reminds us5:

“An elementary but essential principle to keep in mind is that a person may be exposed to an agent and then develop disease without there being any causal connection between the exposure and the disease. For this reason, we cannot consider the incidence proportion or the incidence rate among exposed people to measure a causal effect.”

Chain, Chain, Chain — Chain of Foolish Custody

Johnson & Johnson has moved for a new trial, complaining about Lanier’s illusionary antics, as well as cheesy lawyering. Apparently, Lanier used a block of cheese to illustrate his view of talc mining. In most courtrooms, argument is confined to closing statements of counsel, but in Judge Burlison’s courtroom, Lanier seems to have engaged in one, non-stop argument from the opening bell.

Whether there was asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s baby powder was obviously a key issue in Lanier’s cases. According to Fisher’s article, Lanier was permitted, over defense objections, to present expert witness opinion testimony based upon old baby powder samples bought from collectors on eBay, for which chain of custody was lacking or incomplete. If this reporting is accurate, then Mr. Lanier is truly a magician, with the ability to make well-established law disappear.6

The Lanier Firm’s Website

One suggestion of how out of control Judge Burlison’s courtroom was is evidenced in Johnson & Johnson’s motion for a new trial, as reported by Fisher. Somehow, defense counsel had injected the content of Lanier’s firm’s website into the trial. According to the motion for new trial, that website had stated that talc “used in modern consumer products” was not contaminated with asbestos. In his closing argument, however, Lanier told the jury he had looked at his website, and the alleged admission was not there.

How the defense was permitted to talk about what was on Lanier’s website is a deep jurisprudential puzzle. Such a statement would be hearsay, without an authorizing exception. Perhaps the defense argued that Lanier’s website was the admission by an agent of the plaintiffs, authorized to speak for them. The attorney-client relationship does create an agent-principal relationship, but it is difficult to fathom that it extends to every statement that Mr. Lanier made outside the record of the trials before the court. If you dear reader are aware of authority to the contrary, please let me know.

Whatever tenuous basis the defense may have advanced, in this cartoon trial, to inject Mr. Lanier’s personal extrajudicial statements into evidence, Mr. Lanier went one parsec farther, according to Fisher. In his closing argument, Lanier blatantly testified that he had checked the website cited and that the suggested statement was not there.

Sounds like a cartoon and a circus trial all bound up together; something that would bring smiles to the faces of Penn Jillette, P.T. Barnum, and Donald Duck.

1 With apologies to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and their “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” from which I have borrowed.

2 Kurt Andersen, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire – A 500-Year History (2017).

4 “Factual Cause,” A.L.I. Restatement of the Law of Torts (Third): Liability for Physical & Emotional Harm § 26 (2010).

5 Kenneth J. Rothman, Epidemiology: An Introduction at 57 (2d ed. 2012).

6 Paul C. Giannelli, “Chain of Custody,” Crim. L. Bull. 446 (1996); R. Thomas Chamberlain, “Chain of Custody: Its Importance and Requirements for Clinical Laboratory Specimens,” 20 Lab. Med. 477 (1989).

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Tremolitic Tergiversation or Ex-PIRG-Gation?

August 11th, 2018

My first encounter with the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) was as an undergraduate when my college mandated that part of the student activity fee went to New Jersey PIRG. The college administration gave students no choice in the matter.

Upon investigating PIRG’s activities and rhetoric, I found the organization filled with self-aggrandizement, and puffed out with a self-satisfied arrogance. Epistemically, politically, and historically, an organization that declared all its goals to be “in the public interest” was jarring and objectionable, but it was probably just my own idiosyncratic sensitivity.

Many of my fellow students and I protested the forced support for PIRG, and ultimately the college yielded to the tide of opinion. Students were give a choice to opt out of paying the portion of their fees that went to PIRG.

Almost 50 years later, I still have a healthy skepticism of most self-proclaimed “public interest” groups, including PIRG. And so, my antennae went up upon seeing a New York Times article about a PIRG back-to-school shopping guide, with warnings about hazardous materials in crayons and magic markers. See Niraj Chokshi, “Asbestos in a Crayon, Benzene in a Marker: A School Supply Study’s Toxic Results,” N.Y. Times (Aug. 8, 2018). The hazard lurking in crayons, according to PIRG, was none other than the emperor of all toxic substances: asbestos. The Times dutifully reported that PIRG had found only “trace” tremolite, but the newspaper made no attempt to quantify the amount found; nor did the paper describe the meaninfulness of inhalational exposure from trace amount of tremolite embedded in wax. Instead, the Times reported a worrisome quote: “Tremolite is responsible for many cases of asbestos-related cancer and asbestos diseases, according to the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

“A thing is a phallic symbol if it is longer than it is wide.” 

Melanie, Safka (1972)

“A thing is a fiber if it is three times longer than it is wide.” 

O.S.H.A., 29 C.F.R. § 1910.1001(b) (defining fiber as having a length-to- diameter ratio of at least 3 to 1).

Ergo, all fibers are phallic symbols.

* * * * * * * * * * *

The New York Times article did link to PIRG’s report, which at least allowed readers to inspect the inculpatory evidence. U.S. PIRG, Safer School Supplies: Shopping Guide: Consumer Guide for Finding Non-Toxic School Supplies (2018). Unfortunately, the PIRG report did not answer crucial questions. There was no quantification of the tremolite asbestos, and there was no discussion of the ability of the tremolite to escape the wax matrix of the crayon, to become airborne, and to be inhaled. The report did cite the methodology used to ascertain the presence of the tremolite (EPA Method: EPA/600/R-93/116). Safer Schools at 5. In Appendix A to the report, the authors showed two microphotographs of tremolite particles, but without any measurement scale. One of the two tremolite particles looks like a cleavage fragment, not a fiber. The other photomicrograph shows something that might be a fiber, but without a scale and a report of the elemental peaks, the reader cannot tell for sure. Safer Schools at 21.

The controversy over the potential health effects of tremolite cleavage fragments has a long history. Compare Robert Reger & W. Keith C. Morgan, “On talc, tremolite, and tergiversation,” 47 Brit. J. Indus. Med. 505 (1990) with Bruce W. Case, “On talc, tremolite, and tergiversation. Ter-gi-ver-sate: 2: to use subterfuges,” 48 Brit. J. Indus. Med. 357 (1991). The regulatory definition of fiber does not distinguish between biologically significant fibers and particles with an aspect ratio greater than three. John Gamble & Graham Gibbs, “An evaluation of the risks of lung cancer and mesothelioma from exposure to amphibole cleavage fragments,” 52 Regulatory Toxicol. & Pharmacol. S154 (2008) (the weight of evidence fully supports a conclusion that non-asbestiform amphiboles do not increase the risk of lung cancer or mesothelioma); Brent L. Finley, Stacey M. Benson & Gary M. Marsh, “Cosmetic talc as a risk factor for pleural mesothelioma: a weight of evidence evaluation of the epidemiology,” 29 Inhalation Toxicol. 179 (2017).

Surely the public interest includes the facts and issues left out by PIRG’s report.

 

 

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Divine Intervention in Litigation

January 27th, 2018

The Supreme Being, or Beings, or their Earthly Agents (Angels) rarely intervene in mundane matters such as litigation. Earlier this month, however, there may have been an unsuccessful divine intervention in the workings of a Comal County, Texas, jury, which was deliberating whether or not to convict Gloria Romero Perez of human trafficking.

After the jury reached a verdict, and rang the bell to signal its verdict, the trial judge, the Hon. Jack Robison, waltzed in and proclaimed that that God had told him that Perez was not guilty. According to jury foreperson Mark A. House, Judge Robison told them that he had prayed on the case and that God told him that he had to tell the jury. The state’s attorney was not present to object to the hearsay. House reported that the jury signaled again that it had reached a verdict, and again Judge Robison appeared to proclaim the defendant’s innocence.

Judge Robison’s pronouncements apparently anguished the jurors, some of who were “physically sick, crying and distraught” from the appearance of a putative prophet in the courthouse. Nonetheless, guilty is guilty, and the jury returned its verdict unmoved by Judge Robison. According to news reports, Judge Robison later apologized to the jury, but added something like “if God tells me to do something, I have to do it.” Zeke MacCormack, “Judge facing complaints over trying to sway jury,” San Antonio Express-News (Jan. 20, 2018); Ryan Autullo, “Texas judge interrupts jury, says God told him defendant is not guilty,” American-Statesman (Jan. 19, 2018). Foreperson House filed a complaint against Judge Robison with the judicial conduct commission, but told a local newspaper that “You’ve got to respect him for what he did. He went with his conscience.” Debra Cassens Weiss, “Judge informs jurors that God told him accused sex trafficker isn’t guilty,” A.B.A.J. online (Jan. 22, 2018).Or he was having a stroke. Somewhere, Henry Mencken is laughing and crying uncontrollably.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

For better or worse, I have not experienced divine intervention in my cases. At least, I think not. In one of my cases, the jury foreman and several jurors were in the elevator with my adversary and me, at the end of the trial. The situation was awkward, and punctuated by the foreman’s simple statement that God had directed them to their verdict. No one questioned the gentlemen. I thanked the jurors for their service, but I have never been able to verify the source of the direction or inspiration given to the jury. To this day, I prefer to believe the verdict resulted from my advocacy and marshaling of the evidence.

The case was Edward and Carmelita O’Donnell v. Celotex Corp., et al., Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas, July Term 1982, No. 1619. My adversary was a very capable African American lawyer, Sandy L.V. Byrd, then of the Brookman, Rosenberg, Brown & Sandler firm in Philadelphia, now a sitting judge in Philadelphia County. As you will see, race was an important ingredient in this case, and perhaps the reason it was tried.

Sandy and I had pulled Judge Levan Gordon1, for the trial, which was noteworthy because Judge Gordon was one of the few trial judges who stood up to the wishes of the coordinating judge (Hon. Sandra Mazer Moss) that all cases be tried “reverse bifurcated,” that is, with medical causation and damages in a first phase, and liability in the second phase.

This unnatural way of trying asbestos personal injury cases had been first advocated by counsel for Johns Manville, which had a huge market share, a distinctive lack of liability defenses, and a susceptibility to punitive damages. In May 1989, when Sandy and defense counsel announced “ready” before Judge Gordon, Johns Manville was in bankruptcy. Reverse bifurcated had long outlasted its usefulness, and had become a way of abridging defendants’ due process rights to a trial on liability. If a jury returned a verdict with damages in phase One, plaintiffs would argue (illegitimately but often with court approval) that it was bad enough that defendants caused their illness, how much worse is it now that they are arguing to take away their compensation.

Worse yet, in trying cases backwards, with reverse bifurcation, plaintiffs quickly learned that they could, in Phase One, sneak evidence of liability, or hint that the defendants were as liable as sin, and thus suggest that the odd procedure of skipping over liability was desirable because liability was well-nigh conceded. The plaintiffs’ direct examination typically went something like:

Q. How did you feel emotionally when you received your diagnosis of asbestos-related _[fill in the blank]____?

A. I was devastated; I cried; I was depressed. I had never heard that asbestos could cause this disease..…

So clearly there was a failure to warn, at least on that colloquy, and that was all juries needed to hear on the matter, from the plaintiffs’ perspective. If the defendants lost in the first phase, and refused to settle, juries were annoyed that they were being kept from their lives by recalcitrant, liable defendants. Liability was a done deal.

At the time, most of the asbestos case trials in Philadelphia were brought by government employees at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard. The government was an extremely knowledgeable purchaser of asbestos-containing insulation products, and was as, or more, aware of the hazards of asbestos use than any vendor. At the time, 1989, the sophisticated intermediary defense was disallowed under Pennsylvania strict liability law, and so defendants rarely got a chance to deploy it.

In a case that went “all issues,” with negligence and even potential punitive damages, however, the sophisticated intermediary defense was valid under Pennsylvania law. Judge Gordon’s practice of trying all cases, all issues, opened the door to defending the case by showing that there was no failure to warn at all, because the Navy, at its shipyards, was knowledgeable about asbestos hazards. If plaintiff’s testimony were true about lack of protections, then the Navy itself had been grossly negligent in its maintenance and supervision of the shipyard workplace.

Before trial began, on May 8, 1989, the Brookman firm had signaled that the O’Donnell case was on track to settle in a dollar range that was typical for cases involving the age, medical condition, and work history of the plaintiff, Mr. O’Donnell. The settlement posture of the case changed, abruptly however, after jury selection. When the jury was sworn, we had 12 Philadelphians, 11 of whom were African American, and one of whom was Latina. When I asked Sandy whether we were settled at the number we had discussed the previous day, he looked at me and asked why he would want to settle now, with the jury we had. He now insisted that this trial must be tried. Racism works in curious ways and directions.

So we tried the O’Donnell case, the old-fashioned way, from front to back. Both sides called “state of the art” expert witnesses, to address the history of medical knowledge about asbestos-related diseases. We called product identification lay witnesses, as well as several physicians to testify about Mr. O’Donnell’s disputed asbestosis. The lovely thing about the O’Donnell trial, however, was that I had the opportunity to present testimony from the Philadelphia Navy Yard’s industrial hygienist, Dr. Victor Kindsvatter, who had given a deposition many years before. Kindsvatter, who had a Ph.D. in industrial hygiene, was extraordinarily knowledgeable about asbestos, permissible exposure limits, asbestos hazards, and methods of asbestos control on board ships and in the shops.

The result of Judge Gordon’s all issue trial was a fuller, fairer presentation of the case. Plaintiffs could argue that the defendants were horribly negligent given what experts knew in the medical community. Defendants could present evidence that experts at the relevant time believed that asbestos-containing insulation products could be used safely, and that the U.S. Navy was especially eager to use asbestos products on board ships, and had extensive regulations and procedures for doing so. The testimony that probably tipped the balance came from a former shipyard worker, George Rabuck. Mr. Rabuck had been a client of the Brookman firm, and he was their go-to guy to testify on product identification. In the O’Donnell case, as in many others, Rabuck dutifully and cheerfully identified the products of the non-settling defendants, and less cheerfully, the products of the settled and bankrupt defendants. In O’Donnell, I was able to elicit additional testimony from Mr. Rabuck about a shakedown cruise of a new Navy ship, in which someone had failed to insulate a hot line in the boiler room. When an oil valve broke, diesel fuel sprayed the room, and ignited upon hitting the uninsulated pipe. A ship fire ensued, in which several sailors were seriously injured and one died. In my closing argument, I was able to remind the jury of the sailor who died because asbestos insulation was not used on the Navy ship.

On May 18, 1989, the jury came back with a general verdict for the defense in O’Donnell. Judge Gordon entered judgment, from which there was no appeal. Ignoring the plaintiffs’ lawyers intransigence on settlement, Judge Moss was angry at the defense lawyers, as she typically was, for tying up one of her court rooms for Judge Gordon’s rotation in her trial program. Judge Moss stopped asking Judge Gordon to help with the asbestos docket after the O’Donnell case. Without all-issue trials that included negligence claims, sophisticated intermediary defenses went pretty much unexercised in asbestos personal injury cases for the next 25 years.

My real question though, in view of Texas Judge Robison’s epiphany, is whether the defense won in O’Donnell because of the equities and the evidence, or whether an angel had put her finger on the scales of justice. It’s a mystery.

1 Ryanne Persinger, “Levan Gordon, retired judge,” Tribune Staff (Oct. 6, 2016). Judge Gordon was one of the most respected judges in Philadelphia County. He had graduated from Lincoln University in 1958, and from Howard University School of Law in 1961. Gordon was elected to Philadelphia Municipal Court in 1974, and to the Court of Common Pleas in 1979. He died on October 4, 2016.

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The Amicus Curious Brief

January 4th, 2018

Friends – Are They Boxers or Briefers*

Amicus briefs help appellate courts by bringing important views to bear on the facts and the law in disputes. Amicus briefs ameliorate the problem of the common law system, in which litigation takes place between specific parties, with many interested parties looking on, without the ability to participate in the discussion or shape the outcome.

There are dangers, however, of hidden advocacy in the amicus brief. Even the most unsophisticated court is not likely to be misled by the interests and potential conflicts of interest of groups such as the American Association for Justice or the Defense Research Institute. If the description of the group is not as fully forthcoming as one might like, a quick trip to its website will quickly clarify the group’s mission on Earth. No one is fooled, and the amicus briefs can be judged on their merits.

What happens when the amici are identified only by their individual names and institutional affiliations? A court might be misled into thinking that the signatories are merely disinterested academics, who believe that important information or argument is missing from the appellate discussion.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has offered itself up as an example of a court snookered by “58 physicians and scientists.”1 Rost v. Ford Motor Co., 151 A.3d 1032, 1052 (Pa. 2016). Without paying any attention to the provenance of the amicus brief or the authors’ deep ties with the lawsuit industry, the court cited the brief’s description of:

“the fundamental notion that each exposure to asbestos contributes to the total dose and increases the person’s probability of developing mesothelioma or other cancers as an ‘irrefutable scientific fact’. According to these physicians and scientists, cumulative exposure is merely an extension of the ancient concept of dose-response, which is the ‘oldest maxim in the field’.”

Id. (citing amicus brief at 2).

Well, irrefutable in the minds of the 58 amici curious perhaps, who failed to tell the court that not every exposure contributes materially to cumulative exposure such that it must be considered a “substantial contributing factor.” These would-be friends also failed to tell the court that the human body has defense mechanisms to carcinogenic exposures, which gives rise to a limit on, and qualification of, the concept of dose-response in the form of biological thresholds, below which exposures do not translate into causative doses. Even if these putative “friends” believed there was no evidence for a threshold, they certainly presented no evidence against one. Nonetheless, a confused and misguided Pennsylvania Supreme Court affirmed the judgment below in favor of the plaintiffs.

The 58 amici also misled the Pennsylvania Supreme Court on several other issues. By their failure to disclose important information about themselves, and holding themselves out (falsely but successfully) as “disinterested” physicians and scientists, these so-called friends misled the court by failing to disclose the following facts:

1. Some of them were personal friends, colleagues, and fellow-party expert witnesses of the expert witness (Arthur Frank), whose opinion was challenged in the lower courts;

2. Some of the amici had no reasonable claim to expertise on the issues addressed in the brief;

3. Some of the amici have earned substantial fees in other asbestos cases, involving the same issues raised in the Rost case;

4. Some of the amici have been excluded from testifying in similar cases, to the detriment of their financial balance sheets;

5. Some of the amici are zealous advocates, who not only have testified for plaintiffs, but have participated in highly politicized advocacy groups such as the Collegium Ramazzini.

Two of the amici are historians (Rosner and Markowitz), who have never conducted scientific research on asbestos-related disease. Their work as labor historians added no support to the scientific concepts that were put over the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Both of these historians have testified in multiple asbestos cases, and one of them (Markowitz) has been excluded in a state court case, under a Daubert-like standard. They have never been qualified to give expert witness testimony on medical causation issues. Margaret Keith, an adjunct assistant professor of sociology, appears never to have written about medical causation between asbestos and cancer, but she at least is married to another amicus, James Brophy, who has.

Barry Castleman,2 David F. Goldsmith, John M. Dement, Richard A. Lemen, and David Ozonoff have all testified in asbestos or other alleged dust-induced disease cases, with Castleman having the distinction of having made virtually his entire livelihood in connection with plaintiffs-side asbestos litigation testifying and consulting. Castleman, Goldsmith, and Ozonoff have all been excluded from, or severely limited in, testifying for plaintiffs in chemical exposure cases.

(Rabbi) Daniel Thau Teitelbaum has the distinction of having been excluded in case that went to the United States Supreme Court (Joiner), but Shira Kramer,3 Richard Clapp, and Peter F. Infante probably make up for the lack of distinction with the number of testimonial adventures and misadventures. L. Christine Oliver and Colin L. Soskolne have also testified for the lawsuit industry, in the United States, and for Soskolne, in Canada, as well.

Lennart Hardell has testified in cellular telephone brain cancer cases,4 for plaintiffs of course, which qualified as an expert for the IARC on electromagnetic frequency and carcinogenesis.5

Celeste Monforton has earned credentials serving with fellow skapper David Michaels in the notorious Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) organization.6 Laura S. Welch, like Monforton, another George Washington lecturer, has served the lawsuit industry in asbestos personal injury and other cases.

Exhibit A to the Amicus brief lists the institutional affiliations of each amicus. Although some of the amici described themselves as “consultants,” only one amicus (Massimiliano Bugiani) listed his consultancy as specifically litigation related, with an identification of the party that engaged him: “Consultant of the Plaintiff in the Turin and Milan Courts.” Despite Bugiani’s honorable example, none of the other amici followed suit.

* * * * * * * *

Although many judges and lawyers agree that amicus briefs often bring important factual expertise to appellate courts, there are clearly some abuses. I, for one, am proud to have been associated with a few amicus briefs in various courts. One law professor, Allison Orr Larsen, in a trenchant law review article, has identified some problems and has suggested some reforms.7 Regardless of what readers think of Larsen’s proposed reforms, briefs should not be submitted by testifying and consulting expert witnesses for one side in a particular category of litigation, without disclosing fully and accurately their involvement in the underlying cases, and their financial enrichment from perpetuating the litigation in question.

* Thanks to Ramses Delafontaine for having alerted me to other aspects of the lack of transparency in connection with amicus briefs filed by professional historian organizations.

1 Brief of Muge Akpinar-Elci, Xaver Bauer, Carlos Bedrossian, Eula Bingham, Yv Bonnier-Viger, James Brophy, Massimiliano Buggiani, Barry Castleman, Richard Clapp, Dario Consonni, Emilie Counil, Mohamed Aquiel Dalvie, John M. Dement, Tony Fletcher, Bice Fubini, Thomas H. Gassert, David F. Goldsmith, Michael Gochfeld, Lennart Hadell [sic, Hardell], James Huff, Peter F. Infante, Moham F. Jeebhay, T. K. Joshi, Margaret Keith, John R. Keyserlingk, Kapil Khatter, Shira Kramer, Philip J. Landrigan, Bruce Lanphear, Richard A. Lemen, Charles Levenstein, Abby Lippman, Gerald Markowitz, Dario Mirabelli, Sigurd Mikkelsen, Celeste Monforton, Rama C. Nair, L. Christine Oliver, David Ozonoff, Domyung Paek, Smita Pakhale, Rolf Petersen, Beth Rosenberg, Kenneth Rosenman, David Rosner, Craig Slatin, Michael Silverstein, Colin L. Soskolne, Leslie Thomas Stayner, Ken Takahashi, Daniel Thau Teitelbaum, Benedetto Terracini, Annie Thebaud-Mony, Fernand Turcotte, Andrew Watterson, David H. Wegman, Laura S. Welch, Hans-Joachim Woitowitz as Amici Curiae in Support of Appellee, 2015 WL 3385332, filed in Rost v. Ford Motor Co., 151 A.3d 1032 (Pa. 2016).

2 See “The Selikoff – Castleman Conspiracy” (Mar. 13, 2011).

4 Newman v. Motorola, Inc., 218 F. Supp. 2d 769 (D. Md. 2002) (excluding Hardell’s proposed testimony), aff’d, 78 Fed. Appx. 292 (4th Cir. 2003) (affirming exclusion of Hardell).

6 See, e.g., “SKAPP A LOT” (April 30, 2010); “Manufacturing Certainty” (Oct. 25, 2011); “David Michaels’ Public Relations Problem” (Dec. 2, 2011); “Conflicted Public Interest Groups” (Nov. 3, 2013).

7 See Allison Orr Larsen, “The Trouble with Amicus Facts,” 100 Virginia L. Rev. 1757 (2014). See also Caitlin E. Borgmann, “Appellate Review of Social Facts in Constitutional Rights Cases,” 101 Calif. L. Rev. 1185, 1216 (2013) (“Amicus briefs, in particular, are often submitted by advocates and may be replete with dubious factual assertions that would never be admitted at trial.”).

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