Opinion ID: 214727
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The PAA's Text and Purposes

Text: The majority opinion does not identify any provision of the PAA, nor any purpose for which the PAA was enacted or amended, that is actually inconsistent with anything in the plaintiffs' offensive contact battery claims derived from Texas law. While the provisions of the PAA are complex, its chief feature is the creation of a public/private insurance system covering reactor accidents, accompanied by a limitation (or `cap') on aggregate liability to the public in the event of a major accident. Richard Goldsmith, Regulatory Reform and the Revival of Nuclear Power, 20 Hofstra L.Rev. 159, 163 n. 11 (1991). Section 2210 is titled Indemnification and limitation of liability. It requires some licensees, and allows the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to require other licensees, to maintain specified financial protection to cover public liability claims, 42 U.S.C. § 2210(a); provides that the Commission shall agree to indemnify and hold harmless specified licensees and other persons from damages for public liability arising from nuclear incidents which is in excess of the level of financial protection required of them, id. § 2210(c); and limits the aggregate public liability for a single nuclear incident of persons indemnified to specified dollar amounts, id. § 2210(e). Nothing in § 2210 is inconsistent with a state or federal court holding a defendant of any kind, including a nuclear licensee or contractor, liable for nuclear-radiation-caused personal injuries not resulting in bodily injury, sickness, disease, death, or property damage. Section 2210 is focused on providing nuclear licensees and contractors with protection from public liability arising from nuclear incidents, but it does not exclude or bar other types of harms from reparation by state or federal courts. Until the 1988 amendments to the PAA, personal injury claims arising from nuclear radiation were brought under state law, although federal law preempted state law in some important respects. Therefore, absent complete diversity, the federal courts lacked original jurisdiction to hear most such claims. See In re TMI Litig. Cases Consol. II, 940 F.2d 832, 857 (3d Cir.1991). That jurisdictional impediment assumed particular importance after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, which gave rise to 150 separate cases against [Three Mile Island] defendants, with over 3,000 claimants, in various state and Federal courts. S.Rep. No. 100-218, at 13, U.S.Code Cong. & Admin.News 1988, pp. 1476, 1488 (1987). There was then no mechanism for removing those cases to a single federal court. The then-existing removal and consolidation provisions of the PAA were confined to extraordinary nuclear occurrences, see 42 U.S.C. § 2014(j), and the Commission had not declared the Three Mile Island incident to be such an occurrence. The resulting proliferation of uncoordinated lawsuits led Congress to amend the PAA's removal and consolidation provisions to encompass cases arising out of any nuclear incident. See 42 U.S.C. § 2014(hh); id. § 2210(n)(2). To ensure removability, Congress converted any suit asserting public liability for a nuclear incident into an action arising under the PAA. Id. § 2014(hh). In this case, the plaintiffs brought suit in state court alleging that they sustained both physical injuries and offensive contact batteries as the result of a nuclear incident, and the defendants  taking advantage of the PAA  removed the entire case to federal court because it is a suit asserting public liability under the PAA. The federal district court rendered partial summary judgment against the plaintiffs because of the absence of a genuine issue as to the causation of their physical injuries by the alleged nuclear incident. Now, the majority holds that the dismissal of those claims also causes the plaintiffs' remaining claims  which involve battery by offensive contact and do not require proof of physical injury  to essentially be preempted and extinguished. The majority holds that those remaining claims must be dismissed, even though there has been no showing that the plaintiffs are unable to establish any of the elements of those claims. I would instead hold that those remaining claims must be adjudicated in accordance with the substantive rules for decision derived from state law, because the defendants have failed to show that the rules for decision of those claims are inconsistent with § 2210. The PAA determines whether an action is a public liability action based on what a plaintiff assert[s], and not based on what the plaintiff is ultimately able to prove. Id. § 2014(hh). This determination has to be made at the time the action is either filed in, or removed to, a federal court, because the federal court has to determine whether it has jurisdiction over the case. Any case in which public liability for a nuclear incident is asserted is a public liability action to be adjudicated according to substantive rules for decision drawn from state law, unless such law is inconsistent with the provisions of § 2210. Id. There is no provision of § 2210 that is inconsistent with the rules for decision derived from Texas law in plaintiffs' offensive contact battery claims in this case. Nor is there any provision of the PAA which requires a plaintiff to prove that a nuclear incident has occurred before he or she can recover on any claim. [5] Therefore, the plaintiffs should be able to proceed with their battery claims in the federal district court under the rules of decision derived from Texas law. As the majority recognizes, `The objective of a court called upon to interpret a statute is to ascertain congressional intent and give effect to legislative will.' The clearest indication of congressional intent is the words of the statute itself. Davis v. Johnson, 158 F.3d 806, 810-11 (5th Cir. 1998) (citation omitted) (quoting Johnson v. Am. Airlines, Inc., 745 F.2d 988, 992 (5th Cir.1984)). The words of § 2210 of the PAA do not require the plaintiffs to prove that a nuclear incident has occurred in order to pursue their offensive contact battery claims derived from state law. Furthermore, the statute's legislative history shows that the intention of Congress in enacting and amending the PAA was to preserve state tort law as much as possible. The report of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs concerning the bill that became the Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1988 declared that the policy of only interfering with state tort law to the minimum extent necessary [is] a principle which has been embodied in the Price-Anderson Act for the last 30 years. H.R.Rep. No. 100-104, pt. 1, at 20 (1987). Consistent with this clearly stated congressional policy, courts ought not to read the PAA as impliedly putting up additional hurdles that are not found in either the relevant state law or the text of the PAA. The majority's reading of the PAA contravenes the main purpose of the 1988 amendments, in which Congress in light of Three Mile Island provided that actions involving assertions of liability from nuclear incidents would be public liability actions deemed to arise under the PAA and to be removable and fully litigable in federal court. The purpose was to improve the manageability and fairness of litigation arising from nuclear accidents like Three Mile Island by making it possible to consolidate multiple suits in a single federal court. See El Paso Natural Gas, 526 U.S. at 477, 486, 119 S.Ct. 1430. This goal is not furthered by the majority's holding that the PAA exempts radiation suit defendants from all liability, except for claims based on or incidental to bodily injury or property damage. Future radiation victims who prefer to litigate their radiation claims in state court are encouraged by the majority's interpretation of the PAA to file separate non-bodily injury suits in state court and to avoid pleading a public liability action in every case, so as to prevent or deter the removal of their state-law suits to federal court and the automatic extinguishment of claims that are not based on or incidental to successful bodily injury or property damage claims. The likely multiplication of artfully pleaded state court suits is apt to seriously undercut the 1988 amendments' clear goal of removal and consolidation of radiation suits to promote the efficient, fair and consistent resolution of claims arising from alleged or asserted nuclear incidents. Indeed, the majority's reading of the PAA would impede Congress's purposes in the event of a future accident exactly like Three Mile Island. Ultimately, Three Mile Island does not appear to have caused any bodily injuries, sickness, disease, or death. Eric R. Pogue, The Catastrophe Model of Risk Regulation and the Regulatory Legacy of Three Mile Island and Love Canal, 15 Penn St. Envtl. L.Rev. 463, 467-72 (2007); see In re TMI Litig., 193 F.3d 613 (3d Cir.1999) (affirming grant of summary judgment in defendants' favor on some Three Mile Island-related personal injury claims). Therefore, if a similar incident were to occur in this circuit in the future, numerous plaintiffs would likely file separate suits in state court alleging only non-physical harms, in order to avoid having those claims brought into federal court and extinguished. The majority thus encourages the same proliferation of separate state-court lawsuits that Congress sought to prevent. In an analogous statutory context in which Congress similarly provided for state law to serve as the source for federal rules for decision, our court and the Supreme Court have emphasized that courts should follow the applicable state law and refrain from creating additional rules of federal law. Similar to the PAA, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) provides for the application of state law as federal law. See In re TMI Litig. Cases Consol. II, 940 F.2d 832, 856 (3d Cir.1991) (citing 43 U.S.C. § 1333(a)(2)). In an OCSLA case, Chevron Oil Co. v. Huson, 404 U.S. 97, 92 S.Ct. 349, 30 L.Ed.2d 296 (1971), [6] the Supreme Court explained: Congress specified that a comprehensive body of state law should be adopted by the federal courts in the absence of existing federal law. ... Thus, Congress ... did not intend that federal courts fill in ... `gaps' [in federal statutes] by creating new federal common law. Id. at 104-05, 92 S.Ct. 349. Thus, federal courts should not create interstitial federal common law when the Congress has directed that a whole body of state law shall apply. Id. at 105 n. 8, 92 S.Ct. 349. Accordingly, in Fontenot v. Dual Drilling Co., 179 F.3d 969 (5th Cir.1999), we observed that our Circuit has consistently rejected attempts of litigants to have `federal common law' override rules of Louisiana tort law in the OCSLA context. Id. at 977; see also Olsen v. Shell Oil Co., 708 F.2d 976, 979 (5th Cir.1983) (following Huson and deploring the creation of new federal common law in this context). In this case, the majority's imposition of an additional threshold requirement of proof of bodily injury, sickness, disease, death, or property damage fails to follow the example of these instructive OCSLA cases, and likewise fails to carry out the intent of Congress to only interfer[e] with state tort law to the minimum extent necessary through the PAA. H.R.Rep. No. 100-104, pt. 1, at 20 (1987). In short, neither the words nor the purposes of the PAA support the majority's reading into the Act of a threshold requirement that the plaintiffs must succeed with a bodily injury, sickness, death, or property damage claim in order to pursue their offensive contact battery by radiation claims. The majority's interpretation of the Act conflicts with Congress's stated policies of minimizing interference with state law under the PAA and of fostering the removal, consolidation and uniform litigation of claims arising out of alleged or asserted nuclear incidents. The plaintiffs' claims of battery by offensive contact should be resolved under substantive rules of decision derived from Texas law, as required by § 2014(hh), because they are not inconsistent with § 2210 and because, as the Supreme Court made clear in El Paso Natural Gas, they are subject to complete preemption, removal, and full litigation, rather than extinguishment, in the federal district court under the PAA.