The NAM and seven other business groups filed a joint brief on 8/12/09 urging the Florida Supreme Court to declare Florida’s Asbestos and Silica Compensation Fairness Act to be constitutional. Enacted in June 2005 to preserve funds for individuals actually impaired by asbestos, this Act requires dismissal of claims by individuals who show no such impairment. As a result, claimants who cannot presently demonstrate impairment may only bring their cases after they develop a physical impairment that satisfies the minimum requirements of the law. We argued that this Act should be upheld as constitutional.
Our brief described the asbestos litigation crisis that led Florida to change its law and the need for courts to dismiss cases where no injury has yet been found. We focused on mass filings by non-sick individuals threatening the truly sick, unreliable medical screenings, and the effect of these claims on solvency and peripheral defendants.
On 7/8/2011, the court held that the Florida law constituted an unconstitutional violation of a vested property interest, namely, the plaintiffs' accrued cause of action that was pending on the effective date of the law. It also held that the retroactive provision was not severable from the rest of the law, and that "the Act as a whole must fail as applied to the Appellees." Two judges dissented, arguing that there was no settled law in Florida establishing a right of recovery without a showing of impairment of health. The plaintiffs will still need to show that the defendants caused injuries and prove the extent of the injuries.