In February 2022, the District Court overseeing the paraquat MDL rejected plaintiffs’ attempts to expand public nuisance law, and confined product liability to its traditional sphere. Paraquat is a product used as a herbicide to control weeds and grasses in fruit and vegetable fields and orchards. The EPA has consistently concluded that paraquat does not cause Parkinson’s disease, and continues to permit the product to be sold in the United States. Nonetheless, hundreds of plaintiffs have sued manufacturers and distributors of paraquat?including Chevron, whose predecessor distributed the product more than 35 years ago?based on the allegation that the product causes Parkinson’s disease. Many plaintiffs asserted public nuisance claims in addition to their standard design-defect and failure-to-warn claims.
The MDL Court granted Chevron’s motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ public nuisance claims, rejecting their attempt to repackage their product liability claims. The MDL court first explained that courts have “been wary ? of extending public nuisance law to cover claims regarding non-defective products that are legally sold, absent some additional wrongdoing.” In re Paraquat Products Liability Litig., 2022 WL 451898, No. 3:21-md-3004-NJR, at *9 (S.D. Ill. Feb. 14, 2022). And, the court held, the plaintiffs failed to allege such additional wrongdoing as to paraquat. Id. at *10.
The MDL court grounded its conclusion in the elements of a public nuisance. For one thing, the court explained that because the plaintiffs’ claim was really a disguised product liability one, they could not allege an interference with a “public right.” A public right is “collective in nature.” Id. Interference with such a right requires more than just a series of individual personal injuries. The MDL plaintiffs failed to allege “harm to the general public” because they alleged only “injuries to individuals allegedly caused by direct exposure to Paraquat.” Id.
Similarly, the MDL court explained that the sale of a product cannot give rise to nuisance liability for another reason too: The seller lacks “control” over the instrumentality of the nuisance when the injury occurred. Id. at *11. Nuisances must generally be within the direct control of the defendant. The MDL court held that “a manufacturer’s choice to carry out its daily business activities” does not “constitute[ ] control over a product after it has been sold.” Id. “To allow Plaintiffs to bring a public nuisance claim simply because Defendants carried on their normal day-to-day business operations while Paraquat was allegedly causing Plaintiffs’ injuries would expand the tort beyond its intended purpose.” Id.