Opinion ID: 779089
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Legal Standards Applied by the District Court

Text: 164 First, the district court erroneously imputed to the Federal Commencement Date a standard of reasonable suspicion. See, e.g., Pfohl II, 68 F.Supp.2d at 253 (plaintiffs should have developed a reasonable suspicion as to the cause of their injuries prior to the end of 1991 (emphasis added)); id. at 254 (given the volume of information available to the public prior to 1992, Plaintiffs could be expected to reasonably suspect the cause of their cancers before the end of 1991 (emphasis added)); id. at 257 (no reasonable trier of fact could find that Plaintiffs, had they been reasonably diligent in inquiring as to the cause of their cancers upon being diagnosed, would not have discovered sufficient information to develop a reasonable suspicion as to the cause of such injuries prior to the end of 1991 (emphasis added)). In so reasoning, the district court apparently accepted Defendants['] conten[tion] that a reasonable suspicion that an injury may have been caused by exposure to toxic or hazardous substances is sufficient to trigger a rule of limitations that is predicated on knowledge of a fact or event,  id. at 252 (emphases added). Insofar as the FRCD is concerned, this contention should have been rejected. 165 The discovery-of-cause standard set by the FRCD, defined as the date the plaintiff knew (or reasonably should have known) that the personal injury was caused or contributed to by the hazardous materials, focuses on knowledge, actual or imputed, not on suspicion. Mere suspicion, whatever its reasonableness, cannot be equated with knowledge; and the fact that a claimant had only a reasonable suspicion that the injuries were caused by the Landfill is not a sufficient basis for ruling as a matter of law that the claimant reasonably should have known  (emphasis added) that the injuries were caused by the Landfill. Accordingly, the district court applied an erroneous legal standard in interpreting the FRCD. 166 Second, in addressing the showing that a plaintiff is required to make under New York's CPLR § 214-c(4) as to the state of scientific or medical knowledge as to the cause of injury, the court applied a standard of impossibility of such knowledge. See, e.g., Pfohl II, 68 F.Supp.2d at 248 (plaintiffs were required to show that the state of medical, technological and scientific knowledge and information was insufficient such that it was not possible to discover the cause of their injuries within time to commence the instant actions within three years from the discovery of their cancers (emphasis added)); id. at 257 (Plaintiffs have failed to establish the existence of a material issue of fact that such cause could not have been determined prior to the end of 1991 (emphasis added)). As discussed below, it is not clear to us that this is a correct interpretation of the CPLR provision as a matter of state law; but it is clear that to the extent the CPLR provision would result in an earlier accrual date than that provided by the FRCD, the CPLR provision is preempted. 167 The district court's interpretation that a plaintiff must show that the cause of the injury could not have been determined within three years after the date of discovery of the injury does not match the language of the statute itself. That section states that if the action is not filed within that period the plaintiff is required to show that, prior to the expiration of that period, technical, scientific or medical knowledge and information sufficient to ascertain the cause of his injury had not been discovered, identified or determined. N.Y.C.P.L.R. § 214-c(4) (emphasis added). (We note that, though the phrase had not been is straightforward enough, some joinders of subjects and predicates in this passage are somewhat awkward: For example, is scientific knowledge discovered? Is scientific knowledge determined — and if so, does the word determined connote a consensus? And does scientific knowledge mean, as the district court viewed it in Pfohl II, 68 F.Supp.2d at 259, `scientific' opinion? See also N.Y.C.P.L.R. § 214-c Practice Commentaries, C214-c:4, at 635 (The statute reeks of the midnight oil of political compromise.... [T]he draftsmanship cannot be described as commendable.).) 168 Despite the difference between the district court's phrase could not have been determined and the statute's phrase had not been determined, the district court's standard finds some explicit — but not unequivocal — support in the New York practice commentaries. For example, the official commentator states that the plaintiff must demonstrate [a] that the state of medical or scientific knowledge was such that the causation of his injury could not have been identified within the three-year period after the discovery of the injury, N.Y.C.P.L.R. § 214-c(4) Practice Commentaries, C214-c:4, at 634-35 (emphasis added), and [b] that it was impossible to determine the cause of his injury within three years after the discovery of his injury, id. at 635 (emphasis added). To that extent, therefore, the official commentary supports the district court's view of New York law. 169 Nonetheless, the official commentary also, after noting the less-than-commendable legislative draftsmanship, states that the New York Legislature apparently intended... [that] the test should be: Was the requisite scientific knowledge reasonably available to the plaintiff during the three-year discovery period? N.Y.C.P.L.R. § 214-c Practice Commentaries, C214-c:4, at 635 (emphasis added). This seems to us the more reasonable interpretation of New York law, for the district court's construction would seem to place burdens on a would-be plaintiff that the Legislature could not have intended. For example, the district court stated that plaintiffs could not meet the cause-could-not-have-been-determined standard because, before the end of 1991, they could have commissioned experts to conduct environmental studies and prepare a report such as the Rigle-Sawyer report. However, `the reasonable cost of a site-specific study to determine whether there has been an excess number of cancer cases related to a multiple toxic agent environmental cause such as the Pfohl Brothers Landfill would be at least two (2) million dollars. ' (Van Pelt Aff. ¶ 41 (quoting ¶ 6 of the Affidavit of Dr. Rosalie Bertell, an expert in environmental epidemiology with more than 30 years of experience) (emphases in original).) We doubt that the New York Legislature meant to refer to scientific knowledge that would not have been available to a plaintiff without the expenditure of huge sums of money to commission independent studies. And we certainly cannot conclude that Congress meant the FRCD standard of what a plaintiff reasonably should have known to extend to information that was obtainable only through the private commissioning of expensive studies. 170 We think it likely that the official commentary's suggestion that the New York Legislature intended CPLR § 214-c(4) to refer only to scientific knowledge that was reasonably available to the plaintiff is the correct interpretation of that section. And we think it possible that in intending to set a reasonable-availability-of-knowledge-of-cause standard, the New York Legislature meant to fix an accrual date no earlier than the date the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known the cause of the injury — i.e., the same accrual date as that set by the FRCD. To the extent, however, that the scientific-knowledge provision of CPLR § 214-c(4) imposes an accrual date earlier than the date on which the plaintiff knew or reasonably should have known the cause of the injury, it is, for the reasons discussed in Part II.A. above, preempted by the FRCD. 171