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The Heroic Enterprise Of The Asbestos Cases, Gregory C. Keating

Gregory C. Keating

The asbestos crisis pushed our adjudicative institutions to the brink of failure, and exposed the extraordinary difficulty of managing mass tort litigation on a scale so vast. Even so, there is much to praise in the efforts of courts to come to grips with this, the greatest of all mass accidents. The asbestos cases are an heroic judicial effort to construct a form of enterprise liability, one tailored to the distinctive features of a mass disaster of unprecedented scope and duration. Asbestos is the greatest of modern mass accidents. It is the expression of a nightmarishly well-organized world of systematically …