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Episode 35 — Borel v. Fibreboard

Episode 35 — Borel v. Fibreboard

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S1E35 — Borel v. FibreboardThe Asbestos Podcast · Season 1 · Arc 7: The Truth Emerges (Episode 6 — Arc Finale)Episode 35 — Borel v. FibreboardSeptember 7, 1973. A hospital room in Orange, Texas. Ward Stephenson has bone cancer. He tried the asbestos case from a hospital bed, and now he’s waiting on the Fifth Circuit. Someone at the federal courthouse — aware he was dying — telephoned him with the news: the judgment was affirmed. He died three days before the opinion published. He knew he’d won. He never saw it in print. And the man whose name is on that decision, Clarence Borel, had already been dead for three years — and never knew a case in his name would exist at all.Episode 35 is the story of Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Co., 493 F.2d 1076 (5th Cir. 1973) — the first asbestos personal-injury case to establish that manufacturers bear a strict-liability duty to warn. Clarence Borel spent 33 years as an industrial insulation worker in the shipyards and refineries of the Texas-Louisiana Golden Triangle. He was diagnosed with asbestosis in January 1969, mesothelioma in February 1970, filed suit in October 1969, and died June 3, 1970 — before any asbestos worker had ever won a case like his. His widow Thelma became the plaintiff. This is the verdict that opened the floodgates.Key TakeawaysClarence Borel — the worker. 33 years handling insulation on the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast, never once warned by a manufacturer of what the dust was doing to his lungs. In his deposition he described clothes so dusty he could “just barely pick them up without shaking them.” He filed his lawsuit when no asbestos worker had ever won one, and died fifteen months after his diagnosis — never knowing whether filing had meant anything at all.Ward Stephenson — the case without the documents. Borel came before the Simpson Papers. Stephenson had no smoking-gun corporate archive. After losing his first asbestos case in 1969, he papered the country with letters and assembled 86 medical journal articles on asbestosis, all published before 1938 — proof the manufacturers knew, or should have known, before their workers ever started the jobs that killed them.The verdict — $79,436.24. What the jury said 33 years of a man’s life and suffering were worth, priced to the cent. After settlement credits, six remaining defendants were jointly and severally liable for $58,534.04. The defendants appealed.The four Fifth Circuit holdings. Judge John Minor Wisdom, writing for the court, reshaped American product-liability law: (1) an affirmative duty to warn of foreseeable dangers; (2) manufacturers held to the skill of an expert in their field; (3) the warning must reach the end-user workers, not just contractors; (4) Section 402A strict liability applied, and the assumption-of-risk defense was rejected. “The danger must have been reasonably foreseen by the manufacturer” — not by the worker.The insurance industry already knew. Prudential stopped writing life insurance for asbestos workers in 1918. Penn Mutual and John Hancock were charging extra premiums by 1928, with mortality ~50% above the general population. A MetLife official’s 1931 memo calculated that accepting worker deaths was cheaper than safety measures. Before the workers Borel worked with were born, the actuaries had run the numbers.The floodgates. Paul Brodeur called Borel the trigger for “the greatest avalanche of toxic-tort litigation in the history of American jurisprudence”: 730,000 claimants, 8,400 defendant companies, $70 billion paid through 2002, with total costs projected at $200–265 billion.Featured: MichelleMichelle was four years old when she started helping her father out of his work clothes — six years of breathing asbestos fibers in their home. At age ten, she was given three to six months to live. She has been alive for thirty-five years: raised a son, adopted four children, and counseled two hundred families through their own diagnoses, for free. Her story is in Beating the Odds: Surviving Mesothelioma, compiled by Dave Foster, Executive Director of patient advocacy at Danziger & De Llano — available on Amazon, or free to any family facing a new diagnosis through the firm. Paul Danziger and Rod De Llano founded the firm in 1995. Nearly two billion dollars recovered for over a thousand families. Free consultation at dandell.com.ResourcesFree consultation: dandell.comEpisode notes and sources: mesotheliomalawyersnearme.com/podcast/episode-35-borel-v-fibreboard/Full transcript: wikimesothelioma.com/wiki/Asbestos_Podcast_TranscriptsPrevious episode: EP34 — The Asbestos PapersAsbestos: A Conspiracy 4,500 Years in the Making — 52 episodes tracing asbestos from ancient pottery to the 2024 EPA ban. Produced by Danziger & De Llano.Next: Episode 36 — Arc 8 begins: The Reckoning. Johns-Manville Corporation was one of the largest companies in the United States. In 1982, the bankruptcy judge described it as “...
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