Products Liability Law Reporter

A federal district court held that a plaintiff in a take-home asbestos suit was entitled to partial summary judgment regarding a defendant’s government contractor defense.

Roseanna Matherne’s husband worked at the Avondale Shipyard from 1965 to 1983. His employment required him to work on U.S. Coast Guard cutters and other vessels built for the U.S. government with asbestos-containing materials. Matherne laundered her husband’s work clothes and allegedly was exposed to asbestos while doing so. In 2021, she was diagnosed as having mesothelioma, and she died of her disease approximately three months later. Matherne’s family sued multiple defendants, including Huntington Ingalls Inc. (Avondale) and Sparta Insurance Co., alleging that Matherne’s asbestos exposure led to her mesothelioma diagnosis and death. The case was removed to federal district court.

The plaintiffs then moved for partial summary judgment, seeking to prevent Avondale and the purported insurers of its executive officers from using the government contractor defense to preclude liability for failure to warn of asbestos’s health hazards and implement safety measures to prevent the uncontrolled spread of asbestos dust.

Granting the motion, the district court noted that the government contractor defense provides immunity from state law tort claims for certain government contractors for product design defects. To assert the defense, it must be shown that the United States approved reasonably precise specifications; the equipment conformed to those specifications; and the supplier warned the United States about the dangers of using the equipment, which were known to the supplier but not the United States.

Under a different court ruling, the court found, the government contractor defense shields government contractors whose work was authorized and directed by the U.S. government and performed pursuant to an act of Congress. The court found that it had, in the past, repeatedly granted motions on this subject related to claims of failure to warn and failure to enact safety measures. The court rejected the defense argument that the plaintiffs’ claims for general negligence and strict liability distinguish the present motion from previous cases. The plaintiffs’ summary judgment motion is based on the failure to warn and enact safety measures, the court found, concluding that Avondale had not presented any compelling new reasons to deny summary judgment.

Consequently, the court held that the defendants may not use the government contractor defense for the claims listed in the plaintiffs’ motion.

Citation: Matherne v. Huntington Ingalls Inc., 2024 WL 216925 (E.D. La. Jan. 19, 2024).

Plaintiff counsel: Gerolyn Petit Roussel, Benjamin P. Dinehart, Jonathan B. Clement, Lauren Roussel Clement, and Perry J. Roussel Jr., all of Mandeville, La.

Comment: In Butterfield v. Gen. Elec. Co., 2023 WL 8697701 (N.D. Cal. Dec. 15, 2023), Charlotte Butterfield’s family sued various corporations, seeking to hold them liable for her cancer death, which, the plaintiffs claimed, resulted from asbestos exposure from her husband’s dusty work clothing. Defendant National Steel and Shipbuilding Co. (NASSCO) removed the case under federal officer removal and asserted the government contractor defense. The plaintiff moved to remand. Denying the motion, the court concluded that the defendant had satisfied its burden of establishing subject matter jurisdiction under the federal officer removal statute. The court reasoned that the alleged negligent take-home exposure here arose from the husband’s work for a government contractor. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the government contractor defense applied only to products-based or failure-to-warn claims. Acknowledging that NASSCO may nevertheless fail in its attempt to use the government contractor defense to address the claim that it failed to decontaminate its employees, the court found that whether NASSCO’s actions were outside the scope of its official duties is a question for the federal courts to determine.