It’s All Up in the Air: Recent Moves to Ban or Limit Natural Gas Appliances

Citing the effects of carbon emissions on climate change and the potential for health risks, efforts to electrify America’s natural gas infrastructure are underway in various markets. Natural gas comprises primarily methane. Indoor appliances like gas stoves are also associated with emissions of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. The electrification efforts are making an impact at local, state, and federal levels.

At a local level, cities including Berkeley in 2019, San Francisco in 2020, and New York City in 2021, have banned certain natural gas hookups in all new building construction. San Francisco’s 2020 legislation applied to new residential and commercial building construction and required use of all-electric power. The ordinance was estimated to cover about 60% of the city’s development pipeline. It followed a similar ordinance requiring all-electric construction for new municipal projects in San Francisco.

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What Dose Makes the Poison? Where Expert Cannot Say, Eleventh Circuit Affirms Summary Judgment

A central tenet of toxicology is that “the dose makes the poison.” Every chemical is toxic if enough of it is consumed, and every chemical has some dose – even if miniscule – at which it poses no significant risk. A chemical must be given in sufficient amount – something exceeding the “threshold dose” – before it will cause effects. This has obvious implications for toxic tort litigation, where a plaintiff who alleges injury from exposure to a toxic chemical must prove at minimum that he or she was exposed to enough of the chemical to produce the alleged injury. This poses a problem for plaintiffs who have been exposed only to very small doses of the chemical at issue. What is a plaintiff to do when their exposure falls below the threshold dose? One approach that generally does not work is to reject the very concept of a threshold dose altogether.

In Pinares v. Raytheon Technologies Corporation, 2023 WL 2661521 (11th Cir. Mar. 28, 2023), Plaintiff alleged that she had developed kidney cancer after chemical compounds from the defendant’s facility made their way into the groundwater near her home. Plaintiffs relied on three experts to prove causation – a toxicologist to establish general causation and two physicians to establish specific causation. The district court excluded Plaintiffs’ toxicology expert, holding that the expert had not conducted a reliable dose-response assessment. The district court then also excluded each of Plaintiffs’ specific causation experts, noting that they had not performed an independent dose-response assessment of their own and therefore relied on the toxicology expert’s deficient opinion. Plaintiffs could not establish causation without expert opinion, and the district court therefore granted summary judgment.

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Dismissal of a Broken Chair Claim Shows That Expert Testimony May Be Essential Even for a “Simple” Product

In Mehner v. Furniture Design Studios, Inc., 2023 WL 2351688 (D. Neb. Mar. 3, 2023), the court granted summary judgment on product defect claims by a plaintiff allegedly injured by the collapse of a restaurant chair eight years after the manufacturer delivered it.  This well-reasoned decision reminds us that even for fairly simple products, expert proof may be required to establish a defect – and failure to develop the factual predicate in discovery may leave the plaintiff without an opinion (and without a case).  It also highlights important limitations in the “malfunction theory” that sometimes allows a plaintiff to proceed without expert proof or identification of a specific defect.

Plaintiff was eating at a restaurant in Omaha when his chair allegedly collapsed.  He sued Furniture Design Studios (FDS), which designed, manufactured and sold the chair, asserting strict liability and negligence design defect claims.

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Tort Reform Comes to Florida

The new law should limit the overall tort liability confronted by all types of companies and individuals who find themselves facing a lawsuit in Florida. This update focuses on the changes for statutes of limitation, comparative negligence and the admissibility of evidence of medical charges at trial. Florida courts will undoubtedly see many challenges to the new law over the next few years.

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Where No Forum Contacts “Relate To” Claims at Issue, Ninth Circuit Affirms Dismissal for Lack of Specific Personal Jurisdiction

Specific personal jurisdiction can be a very straightforward concept.  If a plaintiff claims to have been injured by a product that the defendant itself sold directly to plaintiff at a store within the forum state, disputes over specific personal jurisdiction would be rare.  Other cases can be closer calls, particularly when a defendant has extensive contacts within a forum but none of them are causally related to the plaintiff’s claims.  At what point does a defendant’s purposeful availment of a forum cease to be “related to” a plaintiff’s claims?  The Ninth Circuit offered some helpful guidance on that issue in its decision in Yamashita v. LG Chem, Ltd., — F.4th —, 2023 WL 2374776 (9th Cir. Mar. 6, 2023).

Plaintiff in Yamashita was a Hawaii resident who brought a personal injury/products liability suit in Hawaii state court.  The suit named two defendants.  The first was a South Korean company that manufactured a battery that Plaintiff alleged had caused him injury.  The second, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of the South Korean company, was a Delaware corporation with its principal place of business in Georgia.  It did not manufacture the product at issue but distributed it within the United States.  Both defendants denied ever selling the product directly to individual consumers.  The defendants removed the case to the District Court for the District of Hawaii and moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction.  The district court granted the motion, and Plaintiff appealed.

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Texas Supreme Court Refocuses on Causation and Affirms Summary Judgment in Herbicide Drift Case

The question of whether a particular application of herbicide on one property caused damage on another’s property requires expert testimony.  When a plaintiff claims that herbicide drift caused reduced crop yields, it is not enough for an expert to opine merely that the drift caused damage to plants – the plaintiff must establish that the defendant’s application of the herbicide caused the reduced crop yield.  The distinction may sound nuanced but can have profound ramifications on litigation.  This is well illustrated in the Texas Supreme Court’s recent decision in Helena Chemical Company v. Cox, — S.W. 3d –, 2023 WL 2335694 (Tex. Mar. 3, 2023), an important and highly followed case focusing on the causation requirement in cases alleging yield loss to a crop from alleged exposure to pesticides.

The plaintiffs in Cox were cotton farmers who alleged that the defendant had supervised an aerial application of herbicide that drifted onto plaintiffs’ properties and damaged their crops, causing reduced yields.  A government inspector conducted a visual inspection of the damaged crops and claimed to find “markers” for the herbicide’s two active ingredients, but no lab testing was performed.  The inspector also identified no “consistent pattern” or “drift pattern” of crop damage over the large area encompassing the various plaintiffs’ noncontiguous properties.  Plaintiffs disclosed a slate of experts to support their allegations, but the trial court excluded the experts and granted summary judgment to the defendant.  The court of appeals reversed, finding the experts admissible despite their inability to trace the alleged drift of the herbicide in question from defendants’ application site to plaintiffs’ properties.

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