RALEIGH, N.C. (Legal Newsline) - DuPont and its Corteva spinoff must answer to North Carolina’s lawsuit over PFAS pollution, the state’s highest court ruled, rejecting arguments state courts had no personal jurisdiction over the companies.
North Carolina presented enough evidence to show that DuPont engaged in a series of transactions designed to shield itself from PFAS liability, the North Carolina Supreme Court said in a Nov. 4 decision, defeating any claims it was shielded against the state’s claims.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein sued DuPont and its corporate successors in 2020, claiming DuPont polluted the ground around its Fayetteville Works plant with PFAS and related chemicals, which are durable compounds that persist in groundwater and even human tissue for decades. PFAS compounds have been linked to a handful of human diseases including testicular cancer and high cholesterol, although the dose required to cause injury is still unknown.
DuPont transferred its PFAS assets to a separate company called Chemours in 2015, but North Carolina says it was deliberately undercapitalized and incapable of covering DuPont’s existing liabilities. Dow then merged with Dow Chemical and split the new company into three pieces under an agreement leaving the PFAS-related legal liabilities with “New DuPont” and Corteva.
Those two companies argued they couldn’t be sued in North Carolina because they had no assets or activities in the state and their internal agreement to cover PFAS liability didn’t specify exposure there. A district judge tasked with complex business litigation rejected that argument, as did the state Supreme Court. By legally agreeing to assume the PFAS liabilities, the high court ruled, New DuPont and Corteva willingly subjected themselves to the jurisdiction of North Carolina courts.
“A company cannot expressly assume liabilities from its predecessor, fail to limit those liabilities geographically, and then disclaim liability based on the notion that it did not expect to be brought to court in a particular forum,” the court ruled. “Such a holding would nullify the relevant provisions entirely because the lack of geographic specificity would mean that there is no jurisdiction in which Corteva and New DuPont expected to be held liable.”