Senate Bill S7758

                                
 
BILL NUMBER: S7758

SPONSOR: BONACIC
 
TITLE OF BILL:  An act the amend the civil practice law and rules, in
relation to punitive damages in asbestos litigation

 
PURPOSE:

To prohibit the award of punitive damages in any civil action alleging
damages arising out of exposure to asbestos.

 
SUMMARY AND JUSTIFICATION:

In 1972, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration
(OSHA) issued permanent standards regulating occupational exposure to
asbestos in the United States. The OSHA regulations established stand-
ards for exposure to asbestos dust and established requirements that
asbestos-containing products be labelled with warnings. With OSHA's
strict regulation of asbestos, commercial use of asbestos and asbestos-
containing products in the United States largely ceased by the
mid-1980s. Civil litigation arising out of the exposure to asbestos has
              

been ongoing in the United States since the mid-1970s. Now entering its
fourth decade, the asbestos litigation is the longest running mass tort
in United States history.

From the 1970s through the early 2000s the primary defendants in the
asbestos litigation were those companies most responsible for the manu-
facturing and production of asbestos in the United States. By the
mid-2000s, due to their liabilities arising out of the asbestos liti-
gation, over 100 of these asbestos manufacturers and producers had filed
for and received protection under the federal bankruptcy code. These
companies that received federal bankruptcy protection can no longer be
sued in the civil tort system.

Since the mid-2000s, due to these bankruptcies, the asbestos litigation
has expanded to include companies that were previously considered as
being peripherally involved with asbestos. Now, many small to medium
sized companies with limited connection to asbestos have been brought
into the asbestos litigation.

To date, over 10,000 of these peripheral companies have been named in
the asbestos litigation. The purpose of punitive damages generally are
to punish wrongdoers and to deter those actors and others from future
misconduct. See State Farm Mut. Auto Ins. Co. v. Campbell, 538 U.S.
408416 (2003); John M. Leventhal & Thomas A Dickerson, Punitive Damages:
Public Wrong or Egregious Conduct? A Survey of New York Law, 76 Albany
L. Rev. 961, 964 (2013); "To charge today's defendants in the asbestos
litigation for wrongs committed twenty or thirty years before serves no
corrective purpose. In many cases, the wrong was committed by a prede-
cessor company, not even the company now charged." Helen E. Freedman,
Selected Ethical Issues in Asbestos Litigation, 37 Sw. U.L. Rev. 511,527
(2008);

The payment of punitive damages in asbestos litigation will "only
deplete resources that are better used to compensate injured parties."
Id.; With the commercial use of asbestos in the United States having
ceased decades ago, there is no ongoing or future misconduct on the part
of defendants in the asbestos litigation that punitive damages will
serve to deter.
 
LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:

New bill.

 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:

None.

 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect on the thirtieth day after it shall have
become a law, and shall apply to all actions commenced on or after such
date.