Mass Tort Litigation Blog

Toyota Settlement in Unintended Acceleration Case Following $3 Million Compensatory Damages Verdict

According to the New York Times, the jury had also determined that Toyota had acted with "reckless disregard" and was about to begin deliberations on punitive damages when the settlement was announced.  The New York Times article also appropriately emphasizes that the case is noteworthy because plaintiffs' tried their claims of electronic throttle control problems.  

Though the New York Times article notes the ages of the plaintiff driver was 82 (the Los Angeles Times says she was 76), the New York Times article does not note that there have been in the past been particular concerns of pedal misapplication by older drivers, and the article does not reference a government report that found no problems in Toyota's electronic throttle control system.  According to CNNMoney, Toyota apparently argued that the plaintiff in Oklahoma case hit the gas, rather than the brake.  In response, plaintiffs pointed to long skid marks on the road, suggesting the driver was hitting the brake.  One wonders if the event data recorder in this car might have shed more light on the issue.  Toyota would certainly want to avoid having juries deciding unintended acceleration cases based on the believability of the testimony of a driver who claims to have hit the brake, rather than the accelerator.  If Toyota is unable to exclude plaintiffs' proferred expert testimony of electronic throttle control defect on the grounds that such testimony is not scientifically reliable, then Toyota should also be concerned that the jury may be unable to grasp the arcane details of software code design.  I'm reminded of the line by Robert Duvall's character in the film, A Civil Action, depicting the Woburn water contamination case; waiting for a jury decision, his character opines, "[I]t's not going to have anything to do with dates or groundwater measurements or any of that crap, which nobody can understand anyway.  It's going to come down to people like it always does."

BGS

Wall Street Journal on the Chevron Ecuador Case

The Wall Street Journal editorial page comments on the Chevron Ecuador case and the current trial in which Chevron is alleging RICO violations by a plaintiff attorney involved in the Ecuador case.

BGS

Moldy Washers Redux: Petition for Cert

Defendants in the moldy washers cases have filed cert petitions once again after the 6th and 7th Circuits reinstated those liability only (or issue) class actions.  You can find the briefs here and here. 

It doesn't make sense for the Supreme Court to grant cert, but stranger things have happened. 

Why don't I think the Court should grant cert?  Commonality is clear, there aren't real damages issues because its an issue class action and the circuits are coming together on the question of issue class actions and their parameters (coalescing around the ALI proposals and the Manual on Complex Litigation) and these are squarely in the field where class actions are most useful - consumer claims.  In other words, there's nothing adventuresome here for the Court to consider.  

For more defense side links with a different point of view see the Volokh Conspiracy. 

ADL

 

 

BP Settlement Upended?

The New York Times reports that an appellate panel has remanded the BP settlement appeal for "clarification" of the settlement in response to BP's allegations that the settlement adminstrator was paying claims to non-injured claimants and engaging in other wasteful conduct.   

 ADL

Update:  Here's the Fifth Circuit decision in the case.

Vanderbilt Law Review Roundtable on DaimlerChrysler v. Bauman

In the human rights litigation over Argentina's "dirty war" of the 1970s and 1980s, a dispute over personal jurisdiction has reached the Supreme Court and will be argued on October 15 (DaimlerChysler AG v. Bauman). A group of Argentinian plaintiffs sued DaimlerChrysler AG, alleging that the company's Argentinian subsidiary participated in kidnappings and other serious wrongdoing. They sued in the Northern District of California. On the question of personal jurisdiction, the Ninth Circuit held that DaimlerChrysler was subject to general jurisdiction in California based on the contacts of its US subsidiary, Mercedes Benz USA. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve the jurisdictional question.

The Vanderbilt Law Review has published an online roundtable concerning the case, and the initial papers -- by Donald Childress, Burt Neuborne, Suzanna Sherry, Linda Silberman, and myself -- are now available on the Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc website. My own contribution, entitled The Home-State Test for General Personal Jurisdiction, takes a strong view that the Ninth Circuit got it wrong. General jurisdiction over corporations requires a home-state relationship; it should not be founded merely on the contacts of a subsidiary acting as an agent, or on the fact that a company has a substantial presence or does substantial business in the forum state (even if that business is "continuous and systematic," to use the ambiguous and misleading language that the Supreme Court should finally abandon as a description of the sort of relationship that justifies general jurisdiction).

HME