On April 13, New York County Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe issued a bombshell ruling in one of many cases that are part of a special docket called New York City Asbestos Litigation (NYCAL). The decision and order in Juni v. A.O. Smith Water Products1 set aside a jury verdict totaling $11 million awarded against Ford Motor Company in favor of a mesothelioma plaintiff, a motor vehicle mechanic, who died in March 2014. Eight million dollars was awarded by the jury for the decedent’s pain and suffering from symptom onset to death. Three million dollars was awarded for loss of consortium. The Juni case was what remained out of three different NYCAL cases that had been consolidated for trial before Justice Jaffe. (The author’s firm was involved in defending one of the three consolidated cases.) 2
Jaffe’s opinion enters the fray as a measured study of the clash between experts’ hypotheses, as opposed to accepted “good” science. She exposes the tensions between what the experts claimed and what New York’s legal standards require in order to admit reliable expert testimony. The result is a breathtaking rejection of the single-fiber theory. Such claims are based on the notion that a “single fiber” of any type of asbestos causes disease cumulatively and, therefore, becomes a substantial factor in causing the illness. Single-fiber advocacy has been rejected by a growing number of appellate courts outside New York.3
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