Asbestos

Bush travels around Illinois and Michigan pushing for tort reform. He says that many class action lawsuits should be handled by the federal court system rather than the state to reduce insurance premiums for patients and doctors. One of his main talking points was on how asbestos lawsuits are bankrupting companies, and how many of people filing the lawsuits have minor medical conditions. He failed to state how preventing the suing of big corporations on ground of asbestos illnesses will save the common person any money.

Halliburton subsidiaries DII Industries and KBR go under bankruptcy protection for asbestos lawsuits. The companies settle for $4.7 billion dollars to approximately 400,000 people.

Pennsylvania District Judge Terrence F. McVerry approves the $4.2 billion dollar settlement from Halliburton for its two subsidiaries DDI Industries & KBR.

An appeals court voted 2 to 1 to remove judge Wolin off of three of the five asbestos bankruptcy cases he was residing over for allegedly showing bias toward asbestos victims. Per legal experts this is a rare thing to happen in civil proceedings. Kensington International had called for the ruling since it had $250 million dollars invested in Owens Corning debt. Even one of Kensington’s own lawyers Lawrence Robbins stated “It is unusual for a litigant to seek a judge’s recusal. Litigants don’t do it lightly. Something must be really quite wrong”. Something was not really quite wrong though seeing that the judges that ruled against Wolin said that he had not “done anything wrong or unethical or biased”. How is one removed for the “appearance of bias” when the judges of the appeals court directly stated that he had not done anything biased? The three companies cases he was pulled off from were W.R. Grace, Owens Corning and U.S. Gypsum.