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Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

reuters.com

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Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This can lead to unfair results, not for you — who cares about you — but for your victims: If a $1 billion company has killed 100 people, the first 10 who sue might get $100 million each of damages, leaving nothing for the remaining 90. There is a valid point there, but one could argue it sets up unfair precedent for companies to act in bad faith if they can get off easy.

How is the business getting off easy in this scenario. It's dissolving. What else can we do to it?

The business limited its exposure through the spinoff. J&J as an entity may need to seize to exist to pay back for the damages.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#62
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

> This can lead to unfair results, not for you — who cares about you — but for your victims: If a $1 billion company has killed 100 people, the first 10 who sue might get $100 million each of damages, leaving nothing for the remaining 90. There is a valid point there, but one could argue it sets up unfair precedent for companies to act in bad faith if they can get off easy.

The unfairness isn't in what happens after they do something wrong, it's in how they structure their operations to begin with.

The point of limited liability is so that grandpa can invest in an index fund even if he doesn't understand the inner workings of consumer products manufacturing without having to worry that one of the 500 companies in the index will hire a bad manager and have it wipe out not just that investment but his entire retirement account and his house and every other asset.

The problem comes when corporations use the same mechanism to isolate their subsidiaries. Foo Corp is making phones that burn down your house and providing financing to buy them with and cloud services to use them with and software to run on them, but these are each different subsidiaries. Then Foo Electronics files for bankruptcy while its shareholders get to keep all the profits it made from selling the other services instead of making the victims whole.

The solution should be that limited liability is for natural persons, not corporations. If a corporation screws up you can go after the parent. Which makes sense, because the original rationale for limited liability doesn't apply there. We don't expect a business to be a generic investment fund -- if they're buying something it's because it complements their existing products and services, and they understand its operations. If they were just buying it as an independent investment then they could just as well return the money to shareholders to invest in that themselves.

And if that also makes it less advantageous for corporations to consolidate into huge conglomerates, good.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This can lead to unfair results, not for you — who cares about you — but for your victims: If a $1 billion company has killed 100 people, the first 10 who sue might get $100 million each of damages, leaving nothing for the remaining 90. There is a valid point there, but one could argue it sets up unfair precedent for companies to act in bad faith if they can get off easy.

How is the business getting off easy in this scenario. It's dissolving. What else can we do to it?

What? J&J isn't dissolving.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#64
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt Levine had a more charitable reading of the Texas Two-Step for J&J: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-01-31/matt-l... The idea here was that a bankruptcy judge could more fairly distribute $61.5 billion dollars among claimants than having them sue J&J one at a time and getting uneven awards and costing everyone more lawyer hours.

But then it's J&J as a whole that should go bankrupt, no a shell company designed for damage-control purposes…

Damage control and intimidating researchers, it seems.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#65
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it's J&J as a whole that should go bankrupt, no a shell company designed for damage-control purposes…

That’s all well and good until you discover that you were affected by something else they did but you can’t sue them any more because they went bust servicing the talc powder claims.

Just because there are more people who might need to sue the company isn't a reason to allow it to continue to operate. This is just 'too big to fail' but for different (and now theoretical) reasons.

Maybe the solution is to nationalize J&J.

"You can't bankrupt my company because someone might need to sue me later" is absurd reasoning.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#66
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it's J&J as a whole that should go bankrupt, no a shell company designed for damage-control purposes…

That’s all well and good until you discover that you were affected by something else they did but you can’t sue them any more because they went bust servicing the talc powder claims.

Are you saying the company shouldn't have to pay people it harmed in the past, so that it has money to pay people it might harm down the road?

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#67
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it's J&J as a whole that should go bankrupt, no a shell company designed for damage-control purposes…

That’s all well and good until you discover that you were affected by something else they did but you can’t sue them any more because they went bust servicing the talc powder claims.

I know some of you love to be contrarians beyond reason, but come on, I'm sure you realize the insanity of your argument above…

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#68
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then it's J&J as a whole that should go bankrupt, no a shell company designed for damage-control purposes…

That’s all well and good until you discover that you were affected by something else they did but you can’t sue them any more because they went bust servicing the talc powder claims.

Also maybe further hollowing out our country’s manufacturing base is kind of short term thinking.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#69
post #20

Apropos of anything else, J&J's handling of this has been despicable. Creating an entity specifically to pick up all of the related liabilities, picking up those liabilities and then (exact count may be wrong, but it's very close) literally filing for bankruptcy within the space of three days. The Texas two-step, as it's called. > In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management u…

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

> The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early.

And yet as soon as it was dismissed, within hours J&J had refiled with different numbers.

The court also said that trying to tie this new entity to North Carolina was also trying to maximize a "strained and very limited" connection to the state, and the administrator questioned why this entity had no relationship to the state of New Jersey, where J&J is headquartered and does business out of.

The court far from signed off on J&J's process.

Re: Johnson and Johnson sues researchers who linked talc to cancer

#70
post #20

Apropos of anything else, J&J's handling of this has been despicable. Creating an entity specifically to pick up all of the related liabilities, picking up those liabilities and then (exact count may be wrong, but it's very close) literally filing for bankruptcy within the space of three days. The Texas two-step, as it's called. > In 2021, the company spun off its liabilities into a new entity called LTL Management u…

Having read the Matt Levine piece linked below ( https://archive.is/KcL2P ) I think that J&J did the right thing by attempting to use bankruptcy to organize payments. It was not avoiding liability at all. The court that dismissed the claim in general agreed with J&J's process, but said it was too early. Some key quote from Levine: > Juries in the US don’t like it when companies make products that kill people, and the…

Doesn't this mean that J&J can set the amount of damages to what they have to pay to what they think is fair?

Imagine if the criminal justice system worked like that.

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