With Justices Kavanaugh and Roberts crossing over to join the liberals, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 today in Air & Liquid Systems v. DeVries that federal maritime law permits seafarers claiming asbestos-related ailments to sue manufacturers of ship components such as boilers and turbines that contained no asbestos, on the grounds that they knew that the mineral would be used in conjunction with their product later in such forms as insulation or connective gaskets. Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissenting on behalf of himself and Justices Thomas and Alito, had the better argument: doing so requires stretching traditional bounds of tort liability in a way that imposes unreasonable duties to warn. By requiring makers of components to pay for damages they did not cause in the name of warnings that the U.S. Navy almost certainly would not have heeded, the Court yields to an impulse to round up deep pockets lest a sympathetic set of litigants otherwise go uncompensated.
I wrote about the case in December and quoted libertarian law professor Richard Epstein, who criticized the use of legal doctrine here “to serve as surrogate (and extremely costly) social insurance: ‘the bankruptcy of parties that should be liable [i.e., primary asbestos manufacturers] is no reason to impose onerous liability on parties that should not be liable.’” At the same time I noted the argument, which plaintiffs relied on heavily and seems to have influenced today’s outcome, “that [federal] maritime law takes a particular interest in the welfare of seafarers, and a rule that permits them to win more lawsuits advances their welfare.”
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/supreme-court-all-sea-asbestos-blame
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