Horrible Verdict
In what we may look back on as one of the worst and most destructive jury verdicts of the decade, three paint makers were found guilty of selling lead paint back when it was, well, legal:
A Rhode Island jury today found Sherwin-Williams Co. and two other
paintmakers guilty of creating a 'public nuisance' by manufacturing
lead paint after it was found to be dangerous." If upheld, the verdict
will force the companies to contribute millions toward abatement of
existing paint; a judge will also consider demands for punitive
damages. The ruling, the first of its kind, is also expected to
encourage the filing of more suits against the industry
As Walter Olson points out, the suit was dreamed up by veteran law firms from tobacco and asbestos lawsuits, using bits of both litigation models:
The verdict is an unfortunate confirmation that the "tobacco model" of
mass tort litigation remains alive and well. In particular,
contingency-fee private counsel have once again managed to 1) dream up
a novel idea for litigation based on the idea that some category of
public expenditure is really blameable on long-ago sales of a product;
2) sell the idea of suing to public officials who agree to front the
action, and who thus provide (along with advocacy groups) a suitably
public face for the lawsuit; and 3) manage to get liability attributed
retroactively to businesses whose actions decades ago were plainly
lawful under the standards of that time.
The firm Ness Motley who is RI's partner in this, is, surprise surprise, the largest single political donor in the state.
The WSJ($) has more thoughts today about why this verdict is so bad:
There are so many screwy aspects to this case that
it's hard to know where to begin. The jurors heard no evidence about an
injured party, nor were they informed of any specific house or building
that constituted the "nuisance." As for the defendants, Judge Michael
Silverstein instructed the jury that it wasn't necessary to find that
Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries and Millennium Holdings had actually
manufactured the paint present in Rhode Island or that they had even
sold it there.Oh, and did we mention that at the time the companies
may or may not have sold lead paint in Rhode Island it was an entirely
lawful product? "The fact that the conduct that caused the nuisance is
lawful does not preclude liability," Judge Silverstein said. Lead paint
was banned for residential use in 1978.
So why is this such a big deal? One only has to look at the situation in asbestos to see the potential ramifications. The asbestos mess began, sensibly enough I guess, with lawyers suing makers and heavy users of asbestos products into bankruptcy for the benefit of people seriously ill (though one can argue that most of these cases belonged in the workers comp. system, but workers comp. doesn't allow those juicy punitive damage payments that pay the fuel bills for the lawyers' Gulfstream V's). Eventually, the asbestos mass tort morphed into lawyers suing any company with deep pockets that had even heard of the word asbestos for the benefit of tens of thousands of people who had never been harmed but only claimed to have been present in the same zip code as asbestos.
Here is the problem with the potential lead paint mass tort: It has skipped right to the asbestos end-game, bypassing the "helping people who were seriously harmed" stage and jumping right to the settlements for billions without proof of any related injury. And for all the ubiquity of asbestos, lead paint was even more prevalent in its day. Will Sears be bankrupted for selling lead paint? Will auto-makers and homebuilders be bankrupted for using it? And, separately, will any of the settlement money that flows to states really go to lead paint abatement, or will most go to general revenue, as it did with tobacco?
OK, so its clear why those of use who care about stuff like property rights and individual responsibility might be appalled at this decision, but you progressive public policy types should be appalled as well. If this thing gets rolling, the country will end up diverting hundreds of billions of dollars to a problem, mainly childhood lead poisoning, that while not solved has really been greatly reduced over the past few years. Just to get a sense of scale, for example, we are talking about far more money potentially focused on lead paint than the total spent today publicly and privately on AIDS and cancer research combined. Totally insane.
