DES MOINES, Iowa (Legal Newsline) – Asbestos lawyers in Iowa scored a big win June 17 when the state Supreme Court rejected a lower court’s reading of 2017 tort reform legislation.
The ruling says Alcoa and Iowa-Illinois Taylor Insulation can be liable for the mesothelioma suffered by the late Larry Beverage, despite neither producing the asbestos-containing insulation at issue.
The asbestos reform law said, “A defendant in an asbestos action or silica action shall not be liable for exposures from a product or component part made or sold by a third party.” Alcoa bought the insulation from IIT, which didn’t manufacture it but did install it, for use at an aluminum plant in Bettendorf.
Beverage’s estate and lawyers at Dean Omar Branham Shirley pursued a premises liability claim against Alcoa and products liability against IITI, but the trial court concluded the companies were immune because they did not manufacture the insulation; Johns Manville and Eagle-Pitcher did. The state Court of Appeals affirmed.
The district court and court of appeals looked at each word or phrase with laser focus, starting with the meaning of the word ‘defendant’ and working through each word of the statute in a similar fashion,” the Supreme Court ruling says.
“But legislators do not legislate one word at a time, and statutes cannot be read with blinders, dissecting a provision one word at a time, setting that word aside, and then moving to the next to address its meaning outside the context of the other words used in the provision or how the provision fits into the greater statutory scheme.”
The phrase “product or component part made or sold by a third party” has a specific meaning in products liability law and each word should not have been analyzed with an “ordinary” dictionary, the decision says.
The component parts-doctrine, as defined in Black’s Law Dictionary, is a rule that the seller of a component part is liable if it defective and causes harm, or if the seller participates substantially in integrating the component into the final product’s design and the component causes the product to be defective.”
“It may well be that the Iowa General Assembly’s codification of the component-parts defense is broader than the defense described in the Restatement or at common law,” the decision says.
“And that is the general assembly’s prerogative. But its use of the phrase ‘product or component part made or sold by a third party is clearly a reference to the component-parts doctrine, and we cannot ignore the context in which that defense arises in determining the meaning of Iowa Code section 686B.7(5).”