Chapter 10 examines the recent mass tort litigation pursued on public nuisance grounds and modeled after the succesful opioid public nuisance litigation. After the 1999 Master Settlement Agreement with the tobacco company defendants, the tobacco companies ceased marketing cigarettes and tobacco products; cigarette smoking dropped precipitously thoughout the United States. In 2006 JUUL introduced e-cigarette vaping products and marketed these extensively to school-aged youth. This marketing program resulted in massive e-cigarette use by students, which precipitated a crisis among school districts and muncipalities having to deal with vaping in schools. Plaintiffs attorneys, allied with school districts and muncipalities, instituted massive litigation throughout the country. Modeled on the opioid litigation, federal e-cigarette litigation was consoldated in an MDL in the Northern District of California. This chapter chronicles the development and resolution of the e-cigarette public nuisance litigation, resulting in one bellwether trial and ultimately numerous settelements with JUUL and Altria, extending through 2023. The case study illustrates that a public nuisance claim may induce defendants to settle.

Conclusion. The books conclusion reprises the arguments advanced for and against recognition of the new public nusiance law, evaluating the competing claims made by the critics and commentators. The conclusion strives for a balanced appreciation of the merits and demerits of the competing arguments. The conclusion turns to three central themes: (1) that of the continued, creative, innovative plaintiffs lawyering for fifty years in mass tort litigation, continually asserting new claims and expanding legal boundaries, (2) that the new public law is best understood as yet another innovation in the historical arc of mass tort litigation, and (3) that the fate of the new public law is most likely to follow the legal trajectory of the development of medical monitoring as a tool in the mass tort litigators toolbox. The narrative history of the evolution of medical monitoring is explored to demonstrate the parallelism between medical monitoring and the new public nuisance law. The book concludes with the observations that the new public nuisance law is in its nascent stages of development and is in flux. But it is here to stay, in the same way that mass tort jurisprudence embraced medical monitoring.

This chapter provides a challenge to enduring arguments about the unifying nature of resistance by enslaved people in the US South by emphasizing intergenerational conflict in the context of fight or flight. Scholars have commonly argued that, while not as likely to flee themselves, elders were elevated and praised for their roles as guides in offering advice and support – both moral and practical – or by simply upholding the solidarity of the slave community. This chapter reveals instead how elders were held up as negative influences by those who chose to fight or take flight. Whether in counselling against direct resistance, appearing resigned to bondage, or actively conspiring against rebels and runaways, enslaved elders could be portrayed by their younger peers as people who had been unwilling to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. These were men and women who had survived slavery, but they had not resisted, and this distinction had personal and political implications for contemporaries.

This final chapter treats the Snopes trilogy as a clear-sighted affirmation of immanence and interiority that responds in a self-contained way to the whole of Faulkner’s study of complex systems as outlined in this book. In The Hamlet, the symbolism of the submerged woman offers Faulkner’s clearest portrayal of an immanent underlayer to our networked social systems, an underlayer that gives value and dignity to the individual life. Although there may be a chaotic quality to the expression of such individual forms of novelty, this does not mean that the larger networked process is blind. For Faulkner, individual experience serves as both a moral anchorage for the larger expression of the social body and an ever-present wellspring for social change. The Town and The Mansion continue to depict how such individual behavior can challenge vertical paradigms of top-down power, bestowing a mercurial quality to the New South and making it open to the possibilities of change.

Chapter 5 turns to a description of the array of common law and statutory defenses that defendants who are sued for public nuisance claims have used in response to litigation. The chapter surveys several conventional tort defenses to public nuisance claims such as lack of causation, lack of proximate causation, failure to define an injury to a common public right, lack of unreasonable interference with a public right, remoteness, lack of standing, economic loss rule, municipal recovery rule, compliance with regulatory rules and standards, federal preemption, federal displacement, the learned intermediary, third party intervention, unconstitutional vagueness, statutes of limitation, violation of the dormant Commerce Clause, and the Eleventh Amendment. In addition, defendants have argued that individual claimants have failed to satisfy the special injury rule that might entitle them to compensatory damages. The chapter evalutes judicial discussion of these defenses and notes cases in which courts have found several defenses to be inapplicable, or overcome by the plaintiffs factual pleadings.

The Introduction argues that Faulkner discovered an epistemology for networked systems in the creation of his own imagined landscape. I present two major stages in which Faulkner’s discovery took place: (1) an earlier vision portraying how networks scale, circulate information, centralize, and produce potentially tyrannical paradigms of top-down vertical power; and (2) another view of dynamical networks that are constantly adapting to produce novel forms of movement and behavior. The Faulkner that this study evokes is at once the modernist developing a spatial narrative practice describing the emergence of complex social networks and the Romantic for whom the immanent life was paramount and even sacrosanct. That these two trajectories of inquiry and spiritual belief are not easily reconcilable gives philosophical and moral weight to the landscape and characters that Faulkner invented. They also provide a striking meditation on what it means for human beings to find themselves in systems so vast and ubiquitous that they can no longer remember what it was like to live outside them and, thus, to think outside of their ideological dicta.

This chapter moves from physical contests to consider those who took alternative routes toward enforcing the respect they believed was owed to them in old age. Rather than rely on physical force, some elders wielded the cultural and spiritual force associated with conjuration, hoodoo, and root-work to solicit respect, even fear, from others in the community. This was a route available to enslaved women and men, and this chapter moves beyond the gendered dimensions of physical competition and age to address wider generational power dynamics in community life. Conflict presented in the context of conjure offers another window into – and reveals the significance of – intergenerational strife among the enslaved, and shows how age operated as a contested relation of power that ran alongside, but sometimes superseded, gendered beliefs relating to power and authority. The chapter shows the existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting belief systems that were understood as marked by generational differences, as well as the impact of this for notions of solidarity among the enslaved.

Historians have long stressed the significance enslavers accorded to public demonstrations of authority, dominance, and independence, as well as the wider significance of these ideals to the dynamics of slavery. Recent work on the violence and exploitation of slavery has reiterated the terrifying power enslavers wielded, and the harm this caused to enslaved people. In presenting enslavers as such dominant figures, however, there is a danger that we confirm their own self-image as masterful even while rejecting their claims of benevolence. A more nuanced narrative becomes possible when we consider how the performance of mastery came under pressure – both internal and external – as enslavers aged. Enslavers could not stop time from marching on and the pressures associated with aging – both real and imagined – wreaked havoc on their public and private claims of dominance. Enslaved people understood that mastery was never ordained, but instead embodied. Bodies, Black and white, enslaver and enslaved, were all subject to the “ravages of time.” Knowledge of this fact was applied when enslaved people crafted individual and collective strategies for survival and forms of resistance.

This introduction acquaints the reader with traditional concepts of private and public nuisance law, the determination of liability for a nuisiance, and the conventional remedies for public nuisance of abatement and injunctions. After setting forth basic concepts concerning nuisiance law, the introduction discusses the emergence of public nuisiance as a legal claim in 21st century mass tort litigation. It describes the theoretical basis for public nusiance claims in mass tort cases and introduces statutory public nuisance statutes. The introduction analyzes the relationship of public nuisance to traditional tort theories. The introduction concludes with a roadmap for the ensuing chapters, tracing the historical basis for public nuisance jurisprudence, early judicial rejection of public nuisance claims, evolution and expansion of public nuisance claims to environmental and products cases, and issues relating to pleading, defenses, and remedies.

This chapter shows how the push for profit and dominance, and the dynamics of slavery, affected white southerners’ dealings with elderly “masters.” As enslavers aged, they could be forced to fight against the rising generation who looked at them and saw dependency and submissiveness, instead of autonomy and mastery. These traits – and general binaries of power/powerlessness – were understood as bound up with the racializing discourse of slavery and the gendered dynamics of patriarchy. Elderly enslavers – both men and women – sometimes came to believe that advanced age was a relation of powerlessness that marked them as closer to enslaved than enslaver and which served to unsettle existing power relations in the community. Those who fought against such depictions confronted communal perceptions of their inability to enact mastery, and these battles had particular emotional effects. Cross-cultural scholarship argues that communal assumptions of incapacity can be humiliating, and this chapter emphasizes how aged enslavers grappled with these perceptions. These old slavers are not objects of pity, but their experiences reveal the culture of exploitation that drove antebellum slavery.

The Introduction sets out the historiographical and theoretical grounding for this study on old age in slavery, and provide information on the demographic conditions of slavery appertaining to old age. This book challenges narratives of solidarity between enslaved people and their elders, and shows how far age affected the performance of mastery and shaped white southerners’ interactions with one another. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, it emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. Showing how old age ran through the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, proslavery propagandists, and enslavers, the book reveals how representations – and the realities of aging – spoke to wider debates on the politics of paternalism and resistance. Ultimately, by illuminating age as a crucial aspect of the complex web of relations that bound together enslavers and enslaved, the book asks readers to rethink existing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and emphasizes the all-encompassing violence and exploitation of American slavery.