Opinion ID: 785203
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Prudential's Actual Injury Argument

Text: 41 In addition to its factual contentions regarding the timing of its awareness of ACM-related hazards, Prudential argues that the Forbes standard requires actual, rather than potential, harm to a civil RICO plaintiff. It asserts that it suffered no injuries either from its knowledge of the existence of in-place ACMs in its properties or from the risk of injuries stemming from those ACMs. Prudential asserts that ACMs only cause injury when they deteriorate and begin releasing hazardous levels of asbestos fibers that contaminate buildings, and therefore it suffered injury only when actual contamination required it to address or remedy the hazards such contaminations posed. Appellants' Br. at 21-22. 42 As we previously noted, Prudential's amended complaint clearly seeks damages for both past and future injuries. Consequently, Prudential cannot also argue that the statute of limitations for its RICO claims should not have begun to run until those injuries became actual injuries and it needed to take remedial measures and incurred expenses for remediation. Such a legal rule would place too much discretion in the plaintiff's hands, and would be antithetical to the basic policies of all limitations provisions: repose, elimination of stale claims, and certainty about a plaintiff's opportunity for recovery and a defendant's potential liabilities. Rotella, 528 U.S. at 550, 120 S.Ct. 1075. RICO's provision of a civil remedy was enacted to turn [plaintiffs] into prosecutors, `private attorneys general,' dedicated to eliminating racketeering activity.... It would, accordingly, be strange to provide an unusually long basic limitations period that could only have the effect of postponing whatever public benefit civil RICO might realize. Id. at 557-58, 120 S.Ct. 1075. Prudential's proposed actual injury standard would allow a civil RICO plaintiff to control when the relevant limitations periods accrue through its timing of the assessment, investigation, and correction of its injuries, thereby producing precisely the long limitations periods frowned upon in Rotella. 43 Prudential cites, as support for the actual injury standard it puts forth, several federal and state cases supporting its argument that in-place ACMs only cause injuries when they release hazardous levels of asbestos fibers into buildings. Appellants' Br. at 20-22. We note, however, that it is Prudential itself that chose to pursue redress under RICO for both monitoring and testing costs associated with potential contamination as well as costs for abatement and repair in its amended complaint. In contrast, the plaintiffs in the cases cited by Prudential confined their claims to costs of remediation, and pursued their redress through state-law claims that require different accrual analyses than used in RICO cases. The plaintiffs in Port Authority of New York and New Jersey v. Affiliated FM Insurance Co., 311 F.3d 226 (3d Cir.2002), for example, pursued their asbestos claims under New Jersey state law based on first-party insurance contracts rather than on RICO or tort liability grounds. They also sought recovery only for expenses incurred in conjunction with the abatement of asbestos-containing materials in their structures.... Id. at 230. The injury analysis in that case, therefore, turned on the interpretation of contract provisions rather than on any statute of limitations. 44 Similarly, the plaintiff in MDU Resources Group v. W.R. Grace and Co., 14 F.3d 1274 (8th Cir.1994), filed claims under North Dakota state-law theories of negligence, strict liability, failure to warn, and breach of warranty, and only sought recovery for the costs of removing ACMs from one of its buildings. Id. at 1276. The MDU court, therefore, focused on actual asbestos contamination as the point when injury occurs, because under North Dakota's economic-loss doctrine MDU could not have brought suit until the only injury it asserted — the ACM-removal costs it already incurred — materialized. See id. at 1279 n. 8 (suggesting that the statute of limitations could have begun to run earlier had MDU claimed different injuries). 45 The different legal principles governing the claims and the limited scopes of injury involved in these cases required different considerations for calculating statute of limitations periods that are not applicable to Prudential's broad RICO claims here. We therefore join the District Court in rejecting Prudential's actual injury concept as it relates to the accrual of the statute of limitations for Prudential's civil RICO claims.