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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

One egregious example of this are the mining companies which create a toxic mess and then let the shell company go bankrupt. I can't imagine going into any community downstream of that and saying that the law protects them knowing that not a single penny of the extracted value will be recovered.

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This one isn't quite like that. The evidence for a link between talc and cancer is mixed. Some have found a link but the best quality study did not:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4200058/

Honestly, I don't really see the relevance. It's mixed, but that being said, J&J (sorry, LTL) have been found in multiple civil courts to be, by the rules of those courts, to be liable.

It's a cake-and-eat-it. "Oh, we are more than happy to use the letter of the law to create a shell company with the intent to bankrupt it for liability sake", but "oh, just because we went to trial and lost, repeatedly, doesn't mean that we're actuaaaaally liable".

Yeah, I'm not saying there's a 1:1 correspondence in the level of harm but rather that the corporate structure to shirk legal responsibility seems very similar. They had the opportunity to make the case that the scientific evidence was weak repeatedly and were unsuccessful, so it seems like they should be expected to honor the rules of the court or stop doing business in the United States.

Our entire legal system is based on the idea that both parties respect the court's decision (or appeal it, of course) and it seems really dangerous to allow the party with the most power to unilaterally opt out of that when it'll save them money.

yeah, great example

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