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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

#51

Post by bagacrap »

SapporoChris wrote: post #15

This agency https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/talc... seems to downplay the risk of cancer. Is it possible Johnson and Johnson have been maligned? I'm not an advocate, I'd be interested in seeing significant evidence that their product causes cancer. However, I'd like to see a firm distinction between talc and talc contaminated with asbestos. The link with asbestos and cancer is clear. I'm not c…

"J&J is facing more than 38,000 lawsuits alleging that the company's talc products, including its Baby Powder, were contaminated by asbestos and caused cancers"

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

#52

Post by jjallen »

FireBeyond wrote: post #5

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…

Do you really think companies can just avoid all of their liabilities two days before something bad happens and protect all of their assets?

Bankruptcy law is hundreds of years old and is designed to protect creditors actually. That’s why there is a separate court to handle things and involved independent outsiders and judges that oversee things. It works and is used every time there is a financial crisis and thousands of times per day at the individual level.

This sort of thing is specifically prevented and handled by a principle called fraudulent conveyance. This principle causes the court to look back in time to what the assets and liabilities were closer to the time of the start of the financial difficulties of the debtor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraudulent_conveyance

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

#53

Post by littlestymaar »

nl wrote: post #20
FireBeyond wrote: post #5

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…

> one pretty practical approach [to how to solve this problem] is bankruptcy. This, after all, is what bankruptcy is for: It is a system to make sure that creditors are all paid fairly out of the assets of a company, rather than paying some creditors a lot because they are early and others nothing because they are too late.

That's a legit argument in favor of bankruptcy of the entire company! There's no good justification for creating a shell company to control the damages on the main company (who did kill people).

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

#54

Post by littlestymaar »

akgoel wrote: post #17
FireBeyond wrote: post #5

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…

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…

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

#55

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #31
akira2501 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a class action somehow impossible if they don't declare bankruptcy? Or they can't distribute money as easily as in a class action? The mechanics of this don't sound so absolutely necessary. Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this? Shouldn't they be disbanded, their assets sold,…

> Is a class action somehow impossible if they don't declare bankruptcy? Or they can't distribute money as easily as in a class action? The issue is that there might be multiple actions, and compensation might be used up byt the first one (eg, if the company was sent into bankruptcy by the first class action, then subsequent cases would be useless). This is a pretty reasonable argument IMHO. > Further, if your compan…

[deleted]

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

#56

Post by blincoln »

asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #8

If indeed the researchers did conceal that the subjects had other exposure to asbestos, that would be pretty bad? As we've seen in a number of other recent cases research is by no means free of malfeasance. Even research performed to some statistical standard may fall far short of truly indicating a casual link. These researchers have gained materially from the output of their research (expert witnesses do not testif…

> If indeed the researchers did conceal that the subjects had other exposure to asbestos, that would be pretty bad?

It depends. Were the subjects actually exposed in a meaningful way to another source of asbestos, or did the corporate lawyers go fishing through past address history, purchases, etc. and will argue things like "Subject A visited Australia ten years before the study and was in a city where some older structures were made using asbestos-infused concrete. Did the researchers think to ask their subjects if they'd traveled to Australia?"

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

#57

Post by scott_w »

littlestymaar wrote: post #54
akgoel wrote: 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…

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.

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

#59

Post by dumpsterdiver »

nl wrote: post #31
akira2501 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a class action somehow impossible if they don't declare bankruptcy? Or they can't distribute money as easily as in a class action? The mechanics of this don't sound so absolutely necessary. Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this? Shouldn't they be disbanded, their assets sold,…

> Is a class action somehow impossible if they don't declare bankruptcy? Or they can't distribute money as easily as in a class action? The issue is that there might be multiple actions, and compensation might be used up byt the first one (eg, if the company was sent into bankruptcy by the first class action, then subsequent cases would be useless). This is a pretty reasonable argument IMHO. > Further, if your compan…

> Further, if your company produces products that kill or injure people, then why should we show any interest in maintaining that companies existence with odd legal hacks like this?

> This seems fairly debatable.

To be fair, we might not have some of the drugs many of us are prescribed to us if we just cancelled every company that ever hurt anyone with experimental drugs.

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

#60

Post by freetanga »

bagacrap wrote: post #50
darth_avocado wrote: post #28

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?

Send execs and board who looked the other way or were negligent to jail? Impede them from similar roles for life?

It is a reality in some licensed industries (eg banking)in Europe

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