Opinion ID: 1463027
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Instant Appeals

Text: On remand, the Stephensons and Isaacsons were eventually joined by fourteen other sets of plaintiffs alleging Agent Orange injuries first discovered after the 1994 cutoff date. The cases were not consolidated, but the district court conducted simultaneous proceedings and applied rulings in the Stephenson and Isaacson cases to each of the others. Together, the plaintiffs raised three tort claims under various state laws: design defect, failure to warn, and manufacturing defect. Six days after our mandate issued in Agent Orange III, the defendants moved in the district court for summary judgment against the Stephensons and Isaacsons. [7] At about the same time, the. Stephensons moved to amend their complaint. On February 9, 2004, several days after receiving voluminous submissions from the plaintiffs and two weeks after oral argument, the district court issued four decisions, two of whichone granting the defendants' motion for summary judgment and the, other denying the Stephensons' motion to amendare now before us on appeal. [8] Even though only the motions for summary judgment in Stephenson and Isaacson were before it, the district court considered all the evidence put forth by the parties in Agent Orange I in ruling on defendants' summary judgment motion. Having done so, it concluded that the government contractor defense barred both the design defect and failure-to-warn claims. Agent Orange III Gov't Contractor Def. Op., 304 F.Supp.2d at 441-42. As to plaintiffs' manufacturing defect claims, the court concluded that they were barred because the defendants' products conformed to the government's specifications. Id. at 442. In granting the motion for summary judgment, however, the district court noted that the plaintiffs had complained of difficulties in obtaining evidence for their position, an understandable problem in light of the passage of time between exposure and injury. Id. To ensure due process, id., therefore, Judge Weinstein charted a distinctly unusual coursehe permitted discovery, never undertaken by Agent Orange III litigants in light of the timing of prior appeals and the defendants' motion, to continue through August 10, 2004, and he set a motion schedule for an anticipated motion for reconsideration based on the results of that discovery. Id. Thereafter, the district court ordered that all files relating to Agent Orange sent to the National Archives pursuant to court order following Agent Orange I be returned to the district court and made available to the plaintiffs for their review. The magistrate judge assigned to the case then denied all requests for additional non-MDL discovery, although the district court subsequently granted the plaintiffs access to up to six complete deposition transcripts utilized in non-MDL 381 cases claimed by plaintiffs to shed light on relevant knowledge of defendants. On November 3, 2004, the plaintiffs in Stephenson and Isaacson, as anticipated, filed a motion for reconsideration of the district court's order granting summary judgment. On November 16, 2004, the district court, without awaiting response from the defendants, denied the plaintiffs' motion. In re Agent Orange Prod. Liab. Litig., 344 F.Supp.2d 873, 874-75 (E.D.N.Y.2004). It further ordered the defendants to submit a specific judgment in favor of each named defendant against each named plaintiff whose claims arise from service in the Armed Forces of the United States, thereby rendering the court's judgment in Stephenson and Isaacson applicable to each of the fourteen additional plaintiffs now before us on appeal. Id. at 875. Following a motion by the Bauer plaintiffs, who argued that granting the motion for summary judgment was inappropriate because, inter alia, the procedural posture of their case had rendered them unable to respond to the defendants' motion, all plaintiffs were ultimately given until February 28, 2005, to submit additional papers supporting their position that summary judgment should not have been granted. Oral argument was held on February 28. On March 2, 2005, the district court summarily reaffirmed its November 16, 2004 Order. In re Agent Orange Prod. Liab. Litig., No. 79 MD 381, 2005 WL 483416, at  (E.D.N.Y. Mar.2, 2005). Separate judgments of dismissal in each action were then filed. More than a year before, in February 2004, the district court had denied the Stephensons' motion to amend their corn plaint to add additional defendants and several new causes of action. Stephenson v. Dow Chem. Co., 220 F.R.D. 22, 25-26 (E.D.N.Y.2004). Although the defendants had never answered the Stephensons' original complaint, filed pro se in the Western District of Louisiana, the motion to amend was denied on a variety of grounds. Id. The plaintiffs appeal. Before us are challenges to (1) the district court's grant of the motion for summary judgment as to their design claim only; [9] (2) the denial of their requests for additional discovery; and (3) the denial of the Stephensons' motion to amend. [10]