Court Opinion

ID: 8927777
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-11-27 06:49:49.570171+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:09:26.735283
License: Public Domain

GEE, Circuit Judge,
with whom CLARK, Chief Judge, joins,
concurring:
' Both the majority opinion and the dissent do our Court proud, joining a few others on that relatively short list of truly distinguished and thoughtful legal writings of which it or any court can boast. Neither opinion, however, confronts explicitly what is for me the overarching issue in the appeal. That issue, a legal one only in the broadest sense and only implicitly presented, is perhaps best addressed in a brief collateral writing such as this will be.
The issue to which I refer is, who should deal with questions of such magnitude as the rule for which the dissent contends would, again and again, draw before the courts? An oil spill damages hundreds, perhaps thousands, of miles of coastal area. A cloud of noxious industrial gas leaks out, kills thousands, and injures thousands more. A commonly-used building material is discovered, years after the fact, to possess unforeseen lethal qualities affecting thousands who have worked with it. The long-term effects of inhaling coal dust are found to be disabling to a significant proportion of veteran miners. None of these illustrations is fanciful; each has arisen in recent times and presented itself for resolution to our body politic. Congress has dealt effectively with Black Lung; it has signally failed to deal with the ravages of asbestosis — a scourge, I suspect, far more general and widespread— and a swelling wave of individual asbestosis claims, to be resolved on a case by case basis, pushes slowly through our court system, threatening to inundate it and to consume in punitive damage awards to early claimants the relatively meager assets available to compensate the general class affected, many of whom have not yet suffered the onset of symptoms.1 It is my thesis that the dispute-resolution systems of courts are poorly equipped to manage disasters of such magnitude and that we should be wary of adopting rules of decision which,' as would that contended for by the dissent, encourage the drawing of their broader aspects before us.
An exhaustive study of the deficiencies of applying a mechanism originally developed to decide who owns title to Blackacre, or whether it was Smith or Jones who ran *1033the stop sign in his wagon, to the management of general disasters is beyond either the demands of this writing or the competence and available time of its writer.2 For today, a few observations and illustrations must serve.
I have already noted the probable consequences of attempting to compensate, on a case by case basis, the victims of asbestosis, a class temporally deployed across decades and comprising an open end extending no man knows how far into the future: the compensatory bucket may well be emptied by punitive damages and expenses of litigation long before remote members are even in a position to line up for a compensatory drink. Even considering compensatory damages alone for early claimants, compassionate juries — keenly aware that large percentages of any awards that they make will go for individuals’ attorneys’ fees and other expenses of their litigation — will likely insure that little of the limited pot will remain to succor late comers. Asbestosis and like disasters cry out for treatment by measures and procedures less limited than those available to such institutions as we.
For courts of their nature proceed deductively, reasoning from general principles to particular outcomes in individual disputes. This is so even where class actions are concerned, actions that can offer a partial, but only a partial, relief from the limitations of case by case adjudication, as the situation of the late-maturing asbestosis claims that I have instanced illustrates. Such a system as ours works tolerably well in the traditional case for which it was developed, where the stakes are limited to who owns the farm or to some other finite benefit. Its deficiencies become immediately and painfully apparent, however, when the consideration of factors inherently extraneous to the dispute becomes necessary or desirable to resolving it. Of these factors, perhaps the most often encountered is that of financial reality.
The limited resources available to compensate asbestosis victims are only a particular illustration of the intrusion of this factor. The more general problem arises whenever individual courts contemporaneously grant sweeping awards against the same entity, perhaps a governmental one, in unconnected causes. However just each particular award may be, the cumulative effect — produced by individual proceedings to which questions of fiscal limitations and necessary trade-offs are foreign and irrelevant — may be irrational. It follows that we should decline to adopt rules of decision which set ourselves such tasks, tasks that are of their nature beyond our competence to deal with justly. Because I believe that the well-intentioned rule advanced for adoption by the dissent is such a one, and that the rule of the majority roughly and approximately restrains us to matters within the competence of our procedures, I join in the majority opinion.
To the contrary of my brother Rubin’s observations in separate dissent — with many of which I do not disagree — it is precisely the absence of “physical injury to a proprietary interest” that persuades me we should not embark on the course advocated by the main dissent. For it is just that indefinable which would engage us in the business of massive and general resource allocation, one which I have tried to suggest that we as courts are ill-equipped to conduct.
If the rule which Judge Wisdom espouses were one written in stone, I would be the first to enforce it by whatever means and procedures, inadequate or no, were available. That is not the question. The question is whether we should ourselves adopt such a rule and then proceed to apply it. My answer is that since I do not believe we are capable of administering such a procedure justly, we should not set ourselves the task. Nor am I so clear as my dissenting brethren seem to be about where the high ground lies in these premis*1034es. Extending theories of liability may not always be the more moral course, especially in such a case as this, where the extension, in the course of awarding damages to unnumbered claimants for injuries that are unavoidably speculative, may well visit destruction on enterprise after enterprise, with the consequent loss of employment and productive capacity which that entails.

. See Jackson v. Johns-Manville Sales Corporation, 750 F.2d 1314 at 1329 (5th Cir.1985) (en banc) (Clark, Ch.J., dissenting).

. For an overview of allied questions, see So-well, Knowledge and Decisions, 229 et seq. (1980).