Hardy v. Johns-Manville Sales Corporation

Hardy and other plaintiffs, exposed to asbestos, sued various asbestos manufacturers and distributors (defendants). The district court ruled that a separate prior case, Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corp., had already conclusively decided key issues in the plaintiffs' favor, and applied collateral estoppel to bar the defendants from relitigating them. Borel involved a different insulation worker exposed from 1936 to 1969; it found that no one in the insulation industry warned of asbestos dangers before 1964, that Johns-Manville began warning in 1964, and that Fibreboard began warning in 1966, but it did not clearly pin down when each defendant's duty to warn first attached. The defendants appealed the collateral estoppel order.