With a widely watched case filed by California local governments reaching trial, the plaintiffs’ claims are in the news. “Even with quotes cherry-picked to make paint manufacturers sound awful, however, [Mother Jones’s] case seems weak.” The columnist quotes my book The Rule of Lawyers on the enormous cumulative changes in the American liability regime, which have made it thinkable (at least to some governments and lawyers) to impose retroactive liability today for business decisions in the 1920s that were clearly lawful at the time. [Bloomberg; more on the history of lead paint use from the defense side).

Filed under: lead paint, retroactive