W. R. Grace and Company

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.