The New York Times article “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare,” tells the story of a corporate lawyer, Rob Bilott, who takes on an unlikely case for a small scale cattle farmer against one of the largest chemical corporations, DuPont. The case is unlikely not because it was doomed to fail, but because neither Bilott nor his corporate defense firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, had ever represented an individual, against a large corporation such as DuPont. Taft is known, instead, for defending these corporations from such lawsuits. Bilott became passionate about the case. He learned from DuPont’s own documents that for decades they had been hiding the knowledge that Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical they profit billions of dollars from is highly toxic. They had been researching PFOA in secret for many years but decided not to use an alternative even after they discovered PFOA caused multiple health problems for their employees and the animals DuPont tested it on. Bilott has since devoted his career to representing people harmed by PFOA after he filed a class action lawsuit for 70,000 people affected by PFOA tainted water (Rich 2016). The largest problem with PFOA, is that it, along with 60,000 other chemicals, was not regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Chemicals are treated as innocent until proven guilty, as if they were people with inherent goodness. Furthermore, the process by which the EPA creates regulations for toxic substances is so specific and rigid that it regularly eliminates studies that are not done by the industry that seeks to profit from the substances they submit studies for, clearly exhibiting conflicts of interest (Boone et al 2015). Similarly, in Superfund site cleanup projects, the EPA reviews studies on remediation options that are prepared by the companies responsible for the contamination, as is the case with the Remedial Investigation Report (RI) and Feasibility Study (FS) for the Portland Harbor Superfund. The RI and FS were contracted by the Lower Willamette Group, which is comprised of ten of the 142 potential responsible parties for contamination at this site (Sunding and Buck 2012). It brings to question, for me, the legitimacy of such reports that are prepared or commissioned by companies seeking to profit from or limit their costs in such cleanup projects, and thereby potential rulings by the EPA.
-Lola Boone MD, Bishop CA, Boswell LA, Brodman RD, Burger J, et al 2014. Pesticide Regulation Amid the Influence of Industry. BioScience 64: 917-922. Rich Nathaniel 2016. The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare. The New York Times Magazine. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/10/magazine/the-lawyer-who-became-duponts-worst-nightmare.html?_r=1 Sunding, David and Buck, Steven 2012. Economic Impacts of Remediating the Portland Harbor Superfund Site. The Brattle Group.
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