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80 Tex. L. Rev. 1899 (2001-2002)
As Time Goes By: Abestos Litigation after Amchem and Ortiz

handle is hein.journals/tlr80 and id is 1913 raw text is: As Time Goes By: Asbestos Litigation After Amchem and Ortiz Deborah R. Hensler* I. Introduction Asbestos worker injury litigation is now in its fourth decade in the United States At least 500,000 asbestos workers and their family members have brought claims against one or more defendant corporations2 Workers claiming injuries due to exposure to asbestos have sued more than a thousand corporations, in a wide range of industries.3 Some corporations have had hundreds of thousands of claims brought against them As a result of the litigation, more than forty corporations have filed for insolvency or reorganization under Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code.5 Insurance an- alysts report that U.S. insurers have paid more than $20 billion to resolve claims through 2000 and estimate that the total cost to U.S. insurers may ultimately be several times that. Estimates of the ultimate costs to resolve all U.S. asbestos claims, including expenditures by U.S. and non-U.S. insurers and uninsured losses paid directly by corporations, range upwards of Judge John W. Ford Professor of Dispute Resolution, Stanford Law School. Thanks to Jacqueline Cumutte for research assistance. Although I am a collaborator on ongoing RAND Institute for Civil Justice (10) research on asbestos, I am solely responsible for this Article, which draws exclusively on previously published data. The data interpretations and viewpoints expressed here are solely my own and should not be attributed to RAND or the ICJ. No RAND or ICJ funds were used in preparation of this Article. 1. The success of asbestos worker injury litigation is usually traced to the Fifth Circuits 1973 holding in Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp., 493 F.2d 1076, that asbestos manufacturers could be held strictly liable for product-related injuries. 2. DEBORAH R. HENSLER Er AL, RAND, ASBESTOS LITIGATION IN THE U.S.: A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD IssuE2 (2001) [hereinafter HENSLER ETAL., ASBESTOS LITIGATION]. 3. Id at 11. 4. Id. at2-3. 5. Id. at 10. RAND identified forty-one asbestos-related bankruptcies. RAND's number was conservative. Several asbestos bankruptcies involved multiple subsidiaries, some of which were sizable operations. In its count, RAND treated all subsidiaries and their parent corporation as one entity. At least two additional asbestos-related bankruptcy petitions have been filed since RAND published its report. Federal Moghul Corporation filed for bankruptcy in Fall 2001. In 1997, Federal Moghul had purchased Turner & Newall, a leading British asbestos corporation. See GEOFFREY TWEEDALE, MAGIC MINERAL To KILLER DUST:. TURNER & NEwvALL AND THE ASBESTOS HAZARD 275 (2000) [hereinafter TWEEDALE, MAGIC MINERAL]. North American Refractories Company (Narco), one of three U.S. subsidiaries of Zurich RH a producer of refractory materials for the steel industry, filed a petition for reorganization under Chapter I 1 in January 2002. Alexei Barrionuevo, Halliburton's Asbestos Liability May Gain Clarity as Harbison Files for Chapter 11, WALL ST. J., Feb. 15,2002, at A2, available at 2002 WL 3386190. 6. HENSLERE AL, ASBEsToS LITIGATION, supra note 2, at 8-9.