Rost May Change the Toxic Tort Landscape
On December 13, 2016 by SchnaderA November 22, 2016 Supreme Court ruling, Rost, significantly changed the playing field for defendants in Pennsylvania. During trial, Plaintiffs’ expert, Dr. Arthur Frank, espoused the previously-rejected opinion that each and every exposure to asbestos was a substantial contributing factor in Mr. Rost’s development of mesothelioma. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court considered whether “a plaintiff in an asbestos action may satisfy the burden of establishing substantial-factor causation by an expert’s ‘cumulative-exposure’ theory that the expert concedes is simply an ‘any-exposure’ theory by a different name.” This alert will focus on the causation aspects of the decision (although trial consolidation was also a subject).
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