The Effrontery of The Asbestos Trust Transparency Legislation Efforts

Elihu Inselbuch, Ann McMillan, and Andrew Sackett co-authored "The Effrontery of the Asbestos Trust Transparency Legislation Efforts" for the February 20, 2013 edition of Mealey's Litigation Report Asbestos.  Please visit the above link to view the complete article.

Excerpt taken from the article.

For more than eighty years corporations that produced and distributed asbestos-containing products — and their insurance companies — have attempted to avoid responsibility for the deaths and injuries of millions of American workers and consumers caused by those products. Since before 1930, they have hidden the dangers of asbestos and lied about their knowledge of those dangers, lobbied to make it harder for workers to sue for their injuries, fought to weaken protective legislation, and to this day continue to deny responsibility. Most recently, these asbestos litigation defendants have created a myth of plaintiff wrongdoing— which they call ‘‘double-dipping''—as a pretext for so-called settlement trust ‘‘transparency'' legislation. This is not what it pretends to be — an effort to make the tort system more responsive — but merely their latest affirmative effort to evade responsibility for their own malfeasance.