Court Opinion

ID: 9474427
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:56:56.172208+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:44:04.565656
License: Public Domain

CLARK, Chief Judge,
with whom GEE, GARZA, POLITZ, and JOLLY, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting:
The learned, lengthy opinion of the majority is the wrong response by the wrong court.
The wrong response sprang from several sources. First, looking backward to the signposts of stare decisis has turned the court away from the road to justice because this case exceeds the limits of ordinary case and controversy litigation in our complex, interrelated society. Second, the court responds to innovative lawyers pressing for immediate financial recovery for individual clients (and themselves). We do not fault the lawyers. That counsel wish to continue the present mode of case-by-case adjudication is all too understandable. The nature of their professional concern must, under the canons of ethics, run only to their present clients. They are not required to anticipate the impact of today’s judgment on the host of tomorrow’s claimants they do not represent but who deserve to share in the finite proceeds which a limited group of defendants can provide to compensate mass tort victims.
Third, the court is frustrated by lack of congressional action. A number of legislative solutions has been proposed for the problems we must confront today and tomorrow throughout America because of yesterday’s production and use of asbestos. None has been enacted. Clearly the powers of Congress to tax and regulate give that forum the interstate reach and flexibility needed to allocate the relatively scarce resources that must be available to present and future claimants to achieve the greatest good for society.1 Yet, Congress can refuse to act while the court cannot abstain from resolving a case presented.
*416Fourth, the majority’s response is directly affected by the question perceived. This seminal case concerns much more than James Leroy Jackson’s individual claim against some companies that may have furnished an unsafe product to a shipyard in which he worked. We know better.
Our dockets tell us so — dockets in the Southern District of Mississippi, dockets in the Eastern District of Texas, dockets in the Eastern District of Louisiana, dockets in the Southern District of Texas, dockets throughout the state and federal courts across this nation. Tens of thousands of similarly situated claimants are already seeking relief against the same defendants, and a legion of other potential plaintiffs stand in the wings, awaiting the predictable manifestations of their identical exposure. Other public and private plaintiffs seek recovery from the same defendants for costs incurred in removing asbestos materials from structures in every area of the country.2
The United States as amicus curiae tells us so — by the very act of filing a brief in this “private” action as well as by the facts they furnish on present claimants, past expenditures and predicted future deaths and injuries related to asbestos exposure.
Finally, the court fails to take into account that what we say here creates new precedent. We are not passing a milepost along a known path leading to a chosen goal. Instead, the court, without a goal, chooses a new path which will compel the way of all litigants who come later. Given this situation, the proper judicial response should be one based on a broad view of the whole question.
The wrong court gives this wrong response. We do not say this because the majority opinion is structured as a prediction of what the Mississippi Supreme Court would decide about the novel issues fixed in our jurisprudence by today’s decision. We say so because a national problem has been adjudicated as though it were a state problem after the concerned state court wisely refused to accept our certification of the issues to it.
Sadly the majority chose to certify these issues to that court rather than to the Supreme Court of the United States. The United States Supreme Court could have given us proper responses. More’s the pity that the majority reads nothing into the Mississippi Supreme Court’s refusal. We who dissent do not believe that the Mississippi Supreme Court simply arbitrarily declined to answer the questions posed. Such a belief would attribute to them a failure to perform an important judicial function. The more plausible reasons are that the views of the only two Mississippi judges of our court were considered correct or that *417the issues certified were not perceived to be proper, controlling issues that court could settle, or both.
We believe that the Mississippi Supreme Court thought, as we do, that if some judicial forum must respond to Jackson’s plea, there is only one right court to do so — the Supreme Court of the United States. The problems we face in this litigation are ones of national public policy. To respond to such policy is beyond the ability of this diversity-based court. Such policy cannot be subject to the whims of individual states because matters of national public policy have nationwide application. Since Congress has not provided a solution, the Supreme Court of the United States should have been asked to provide one. Had that Court answered the questions previously suggested (750 F.2d at 1335), it would have afforded the only justice a judicial forum is capable of providing for this case.
Because the majority’s wrong response comes from the wrong court, we respectfully dissent.

. Pneumoconiosis, black lung disease, in coal mines cried out for a national legislative response; it received one. 30 U.S.C. § 901 et seq. Asbestos disease speaks with a louder voice.

. Numerous texts and articles define the dimensions of asbestos litigation, litigation costs, and the resulting fiscal problems created for plaintiffs and defendants. See, e.g., Hensler, Felstiner, Selvin, Ebener, Asbestos in the Courts: The Challenge of Mass Toxic Torts (The Institute for Civil Justice, Rand Corp. 1985); The Institute for Civil Justice, An Overview of the First Five Program Years (1985); Kakalik, Ebener, Felstiner, Haggstrom & Shanley, Costs of Asbestos Litigation (The Institute for Civil Justice, Rand Corp. 1984); Kakalik, Ebener, Felstiner, Haggs-trom & Shanley, Variation in Asbestos Litigation, Compensation and Expenses (The Institute for Civil Justice, Rand Corp. 1984); T. Willging, Asbestos Case Management: Pretrial and Trial Procedures (Federal Judicial Center 1985); Harris, Asbestos Chapter 11 "Solution" to the Tort Litigation System in Recent Developments in Tort Law Reform, 39 The Business Lawyer 209 (Johnson ed. Nov. 1983); Locks, Asbestos-Related Disease Litigation: Can the Beast Be Tamed? 28 Vill.L.Rev. 1184 (1983); Markaron, The Inapplicability or Reduction of Punitive Damages in Asbestos Litigation, Industrywide Litigation, Defense of Asbestos Lawsuits, DRI 81-1; Phillips, Asbestos Litigation: the Test of the Tort System 36 Ark.L.Rev. 343 (1983); Special Project, An Analysis, of the Legal, Social and Political Issues Raised by the Asbestos Litigation, 36 Vand.L. Rev. 573 (1983); Comment, An Examination of Recurring Issues in Asbestos Litigation 46 Alb.L. Rev. 1307 (1982); Comment, Asbestos Litigation: The Dust Has Yet to Settle, 7 Fordham Urb.L.J. 55 (1978); Note, Mass Liability and Punitive Damages Overkill, 30 Hastings L.J. 1797 (1979); Comment, The Asbestos Tragedy: Legal Issues and the Need for Reform, 8 U. Dayton L.Rev. 353 (1983); Olick, Chapter 11 — A Dubious Solution to Massive Toxic Tort Liability, 18 Forum 361 (1983); Brodeur, "Annuals of Law” (Asbestos — Parts I-IV), The New Yorker, (June 10, 1985-July 1, 1985).