What Courts Can Do in the Face of the Never-Ending Asbestos Crisis
![handle is hein.journals/mislj71 and id is 9 raw text is: WHAT COURTS CAN DO IN THE FACE OF
THE NEVER-ENDING ASBESTOS CRISIS
Paul F. Rothstein*
For more than twenty-five years, state and federal courts
across the country have struggled to respond to an ever-
expanding asbestos litigation crisis.' Over $20 billion and
thirty bankruptcies later, more asbestos claims are filed now
than ever before.2 Many predict that the number of claims
(and the number of bankruptcies) will only keep increasing
and that tens of billions of additional dollars will be spent.'
Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Rothstein is
author of Evidence: Cases, Materials and Problems, Evidence in a Nutshell: State
and Federal Rules of Evidence and several other books as well as over 100
articles. The preparation of this article was made possible by funding from the
Coalition for Asbestos Justice, Inc.
One of the first major asbestos-liability cases was Borel v. Fibreboard Corp.,
493 F.2d 1076 (5th Cir. 1973), where the court of appeals affirmed a verdict
against an asbestos defendant on a strict liability theory.
2 See Harold Brubaker, Three Major Firms Have Filed for Bankruptcy
Protection from Asbestos Claims, PHILA. INQUIRER, Jan. 13, 2001 (describing the
history of Crown Cork & Seal which, for three months in the early 1960s, owned
a company that made one product that allegedly contained asbestos and still
spent $90 million on asbestos claims in 2000 alone); John Rooney, Evolution, Not
End, Seen for Asbestos Litigation, CI. DAILY L. BULL., Apr. 21, 2001; A Trail of
Toxic Torts: Fresh Asbestos Trouble for Insurers, THE ECONOMIST, Jan. 27, 2001,
available at 2001 WL 7317425.
See The Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act: Hearing on H.R. 1283
Before the House Comm. on the Judiciary, 106th Cong. (1999) [hereinafter
Hearings] (statement of Christopher Edley, Jr., Professor, Harvard Law School);
Christopher Bowe, The Americas: Asbestos Sparks New Jitters in US Litigation,
FIN. TIMES, Jan. 31, 2001; Queena Sook Kim, Asbestos Claims Continue to Mount,
WALL ST. J., Feb. 7, 2001, at B1, available at 2001 WL-WSJ 2853509; Richard B.
Schmitt, How Plaintiffs' Lawyers Have Turned Asbestos into a Court Perennial,
WALL ST. J., March 5, 2001, at A-i, available at 2001 WL-WSJ 2856111. A.M.
Best Co. recently estimated that asbestos claims could ultimately cost the
insurance industry $65 billion. Lorraine Gorski, Asbestos Claims Surge Set to
Dampen Earnings for Commercial Insurers, BESTWIRE, May 8, 2001. Additional
billions of dollars would be incurred by defendants themselves. A recent study by](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/mislj71&div=7&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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What Courts Can Do in the Face of the Never-Ending Asbestos Crisis
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