The 4th District Court of Appeal in Florida has given new life to thousands of asbestos related lawsuits. What the court did invalidates the retroactivity feature of the 2005 law which would limit the number of people eligible to sue. Industry lawyers said that this ruling was likely to be appealed to the Florida Supreme Court partly because the 3rd District Court of Appeal had ruled that the retroactivity is valid.
Judge Gary Farmer wrote for the unanimous court that the Florida Asbestos and Silica Compensation Fairness Act “may not constitutionally be applied to eliminate the existing vested rights in the lawsuits pending when the act became effective” July 1, 2005. Judges W. Matthew Stevenson and Carole Taylor concurred.
Attorney Joel Perwin who helped handle the 4th District appealfor the plaintiffs has said that this means that there thousands of cases that were in the pipeline before the law was passed that now have new life. He said that there are limits to legislative power and that you don’t take away existing rights when you pass new laws.
The 2005 law set impairment standards for plaintiffs. People with nonmalignant asbestosis must have lost at least 20 percent of their breathing capacity to sue, and those with lung cancer would have to have asbestosis and diminished breathing capacity to discount the effects of smoking.
Attorney John Pelzer, who handled the appeal for the industry, said he was disappointed by the ruling.
The law was designed to “put people who were sick at the head of the line” for compensation from a limited fund ahead of people who were exposed to asbestos but not yet sick, said Pelzer, a partner at Ruden McCloskey Smith Schuster & Russell in Fort Lauderdale.
The 4th DCA ruling is an attempt “to undo that effort and put us back to what I call the Dark Ages of asbestos litigation where people who aren’t really sick are cutting in the line ahead of people who are sick,” he said.
