Opinion ID: 537621
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: eagle-picher's arguments for summary judgment

Text: 20 Eagle-Picher's first series of arguments challenge the district court's denial of its motion asserting Boyle as grounds for summary judgment in its favor. Eagle-Picher's claim for summary judgment calls upon us to determine the general standards guiding a court in applying Boyle to a failure-to-warn claim. 21 Before we turn to the standard governing the application of Boyle to this case, we initially note that Boyle concerned federal displacement of a state law design defect action. In this case, by contrast, the workers have alleged failure to warn, a separate tort theory. This distinction, the workers claim, is enough to render Boyle inapplicable. We disagree. When a federal contract and state tort law give contrary messages as to the nature and content of required product warnings, they cause the sort of conflict Boyle found so detrimental to the federal interest in regulating the liabilities of military contractors. Just as with conflicting federal and state design requirements, the existence of conflicting federal and state warning requirements can undermine the Government's ability to control military procurement. Consequently, we follow the other federal courts which already have held that Boyle may apply to a state law failure-to-warn claim. See Garner v. Santoro, 865 F.2d 629, 635 (5th Cir.1989); Niemann v. McDonnell Douglas Corp., 721 F.Supp. 1019, 1024-25 (S.D.Ill.1989); Dorse v. Armstrong World Indus., 716 F.Supp. 589, 590 (S.D.Fla.1989); Nicholson v. United Technologies Corp., 697 F.Supp. 598, 604 (D.Conn.1988). 22 Having found that, in appropriate circumstances, Boyle may require displacement of such a duty, we next consider under what circumstances Boyle requires displacement of a state law duty to warn. We agree with the district court that for Eagle-Picher to establish that Boyle displaces any state law duty to warn, Eagle-Picher must show that the applicable federal contract includes warning requirements that significantly conflict with those that might be imposed by state law. Moreover, it seems clear to us that Boyle 's requirement of government approval of reasonably precise specifications mandates that the federal duties be imposed upon the contractor. The contractor must show that whatever warnings accompanied a product resulted from a determination of a government official, see Boyle, 108 S.Ct. at 2518 (feature in question [must be] considered by a Government officer, and not merely by the contractor itself), and thus that the Government itself dictated the content of the warnings meant to accompany the product. See Nicholson, 697 F.Supp. at 604. Put differently, under Boyle, for the military contractor defense to apply, government officials ultimately must remain the agents of decision. 4 23 Eagle-Picher has resisted any reading of Boyle which would emphasize specific government imposition of a particular type of product warnings. Instead, it has offered five alternative approaches for applying Boyle to this case, all of which tend to lower the threshold of government involvement in shaping the nature and content of product warnings necessary to establish a military contractor defense. Not surprisingly, each approach suggested to us by Eagle-Picher would lead to our reversing the district court and granting summary judgment in Eagle-Picher's favor. Because all of these suggested approaches sidestep what to us is the most essential factor in deciding whether Boyle should bar a state law failure-to-warn claim, we find none of them persuasive. We discuss each contention in turn. 24 First, Eagle-Picher asserts that in this case the Navy issued reasonably precise specifications requiring that its product contain asbestos, thus requiring displacement of any state law duty to warn. Under Boyle, a federal contract provision directed by the Government will displace a parallel state law requirement. Accepting that the relevant Navy contract commanded an asbestos-based product, such a requirement would displace a contrary state law duty--i.e., one that required the product not contain asbestos. However, we do not see how a federal contract specification requiring a certain product design conflicts with state law requiring a certain set of warnings incident to use of that product or design. Here the Navy specification requiring that Eagle-Picher's cement product include asbestos does not conflict with a state law duty to warn and accordingly does not command its displacement. 5 25 Second, even accepting that the Government's specifications did not touch upon the duty to warn, Eagle-Picher insists that, as a matter of law, reasonably precise government specification of product content should suffice to displace a state law duty to warn, because to impose liability upon a military contractor for failure to warn in instances when Boyle would bar a design defect action would render the military contractor defense a dead letter. In this vein, Eagle-Picher depicts the workers' state law failure-to-warn action as an end run around Boyle. We disagree. As the Boyle Court pointedly explained, [C]onflict there must be. Boyle, 108 S.Ct. at 2516. To us, a plaintiff's ability to pursue a failure-to-warn claim when Boyle may foreclose a design defect claim is not indicative of some loophole inadvertently left open by Boyle, but rather demonstrates a crucial lack of the necessary conflict between state and federal warning requirements. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to imagine that, as in this case, government contracts often may focus upon product content and design while leaving other safety-related decisions, such as the method of product manufacture or the nature of product warnings, to the contractor's sole discretion. In these instances, state law design requirements are displaced, although state law warning requirements are not. See Garner v. Santoro, 865 F.2d 629, 635-36 (5th Cir.1989) (observing the difficulty that a defendant will have under Boyle in establishing an identifiable federal interest or policy in the existence or methods of warning and a significant conflict between that federal interest or policy and the operation of state law). In a failure-to-warn action, where no conflict exists between requirements imposed under a federal contract and a state law duty to warn, regardless of any conflict which may exist between the contract and state law design requirements, Boyle commands that we defer to the operation of state law. 26 Third, Eagle-Picher offers still another reason why we should bar a failure-to-warn claim in instances where Boyle would preclude a design defect claim. Permitting the failure-to-warn claim in these instances, Eagle-Picher urges, would result in the imposition of pass-through costs from the contractor upon the Government. Although the desire to limit pass-through costs motivated the Court's decision in Boyle, see Boyle, 108 S.Ct. at 2518, it is not the dispositive consideration. Had Boyle 's aim been to prevent military contractors from passing any liability costs on to the Government, it simply could have granted military contractors a blanket immunity from all state tort liability. After all, any potential risk faced by a military contractor inevitably will be reflected in the price it charges the Government. Boyle, however, rejected a construction of the military contractor defense based upon the Feres doctrine, see Feres v. United States, 340 U.S. 135, 71 S.Ct. 153, 95 L.Ed. 152 (1950), which would have immunized a military contractor whenever a good it supplied injures an armed services member in the course of military service, in part because such a rule would cast a military contractor's immunity too broadly. See Boyle, 108 S.Ct. at 2517. As we have stressed above, Boyle hinges the military contractor defense upon the military contractor's having followed a government-approved requirement contrary to a state tort law duty, a condition far more precise than Eagle-Picher's broad and amorphous concern for avoiding the liability costs military contractors may derivatively impose upon the Government. 27 Fourth, Eagle-Picher notes that Boyle derived the military contractor defense from the discretionary function exception to the FTCA. According to Eagle-Picher, the record indicates that the Government made a conscious decision not to warn those working in shipyards during World War II of the dangers they faced from coming into contact with asbestos. This decision not to warn workers, Eagle-Picher submits, was a discretionary decision protected from suit by the discretionary function exception. See Robinson v. United States, 891 F.2d 31 at 36-38 (2d Cir.1989); see also Myslakowski v. United States, 806 F.2d 94, 97-99 (6th Cir.1986) (Government's failure to warn purchaser of surplus Jeep of Jeep's tendency to roll over protected by discretionary function exception), cert. denied, Y480 U.S. 948, 107 S.Ct. 1608, 94 L.Ed.2d 793 (1987); Ford v. American Motors Corp., 770 F.2d 465 (5th Cir.1985) (same). But cf. Dube v. Pittsburgh Corning, 870 F.2d 790, 796-800 (1st Cir.1989) (Government's failure to warn of hazards resulting from exposure to asbestos not protected by discretionary function exception when Government never made affirmative decision whether to warn). Contending that the Government would have had immunity under the discretionary function exception if sued by the workers in this case, Eagle-Picher concludes that it, too, should be immune. 28 Eagle-Picher, however, omits a crucial distinction between the discretionary function exception and the military contractor defense. Stripped to its essentials, the military contractor's defense under Boyle is to claim, The Government made me do it. Boyle displaces state law only when the Government, making a discretionary, safety-related military procurement decision contrary to the requirements of state law, incorporates this decision into a military contractor's contractual obligations, thereby limiting the contractor's ability to accommodate safety in a different fashion. Accepted as true, Eagle-Picher's allegations prove only that the Government made a discretionary decision not to warn those working with asbestos at our nation's shipyards during World War II of the hazards of asbestos. These allegations do not at all indicate that the Government controlled or limited the ability of contractors like Eagle-Picher themselves to warn those who would come into contact with its product. 29 Fifth and finally, Eagle-Picher insists that the third element of the Boyle test--requiring the supplier to warn the Government about any dangers in the use of the equipment that were known to the supplier but not to the Government, see Boyle, 108 S.Ct. at 2518--implies a preemption of any state law duty Eagle-Picher may have had to warn third parties coming in contact with the equipment. As we noted above, the requirement that a contractor inform the Government of the dangers attending to the equipment it proposes to supply is geared to ensure that the Government makes its decision to contract for that particular equipment with benefit of full knowledge of all hazards. By contrast, tort law duties to warn accomplish an entirely different objective of helping those who use or otherwise come into contact with a product to protect their own safety. Apart from their common use of the word warn, the two duties bear absolutely no similarity to one another. Consequently, we reject the argument that the third element of the Boyle test preempts state law duties to warn. 30