 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
City of Chicago v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp.11/18/2004
quoting City of Cincinnati, 95 Ohio St. 3d at 420, 768 N.E.2d at 1143.
Dealer defendants argue that the appellate court failed to apply Illinois law precluding public nuisance liability where the defendant does not control the alleged nuisance at the time of injury and, therefore, cannot effectively abate it. Defendants insist that control and proximate cause are distinct concepts and that Illinois courts have, for many decades, required both to be proven in nuisance cases. The control requirement, according to defendants, serves as a " boundary-setting limitation on liability."
Plaintiffs acknowledge the general rule that when a defendant is blameless for the subsequent misuse of its product, it bears no legal responsibility for a nuisance subsequently created by those who have purchased the product. See, e.g., Traube v. Freund, 333 Ill. App. 3d 198, 201-02 (2002) (holding that manufacturer of pesticide cannot be held liable in public nuisance for contamination of lake resulting from farmers' use of the pesticide on adjacent property; and noting that "the absence of a manufacturer's control over a product at the time the nuisance is created generally is fatal to any nuisance or negligence claim"). Plaintiffs argue, however, that neither the case law nor the Restatement imposes a control requirement in addition to the causation requirement and, further, that when cause in fact is proven, a defendant may be held liable if he substantially participated in the creation or maintenance of the nuisance, even if he no longer controlled the instrumentality. In effect, plaintiffs' contention is that because defendants participate in transactions that eventually lead to gun violence in the city of Chicago , they are not "blameless" for the subsequent misuse of the firearms they sell.
This court has discussed the question of control in the context of a nuisance claim only once, in People v. Brockman, in which we acknowledged the "oft-stated rule" that nuisance liability "requires that the defendant be in control * either through ownership or control of the property." People v. Brockman, 143 Ill. 2d 351, 373 (1991) (citing cases from the appellate court and from other jurisdictions). The public nuisance at issue in Brockman was pollution caused by the illegal disposal of hazardous substances in a landfill. The defendant landfill operator filed a third-party complaint against certain of his customers who had been the source of the hazardous substances, seeking contribution towards the costs of removal. We concluded that although the customers' control argument was compelling, "the differing policy interests attendant to our contribution statute require that we not regard `control' as the dominant consideration in cases such as the one before us." Brockman, 143 Ill. 2d at 373. Thus, we concluded that:
" rinciples of equity support our conclusion that control does not operate to bar a contribution claim based on violations of the Act which create a public nuisance. Where a proper claim for contribution may be stated, the fact that a contributing polluter lacked control over the premises will not defeat that claim. By our holding we do not advocate total disregard of the issue of control, for it may properly be a consideration in the apportioning of fault." Brockman, 143 Ill. 2d at 374.
In Brockman, we recognized control as a "consideration" and an "issue," but not as a prerequisite to the imposition of nuisance liability. Implicit in our holding, however, was a conclusion that although the "contributing polluters" did not have control over the property at the time abatement was to be undertaken, they did have control over the polluting hazardous substances at the time the
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Illinois Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|