Chapter 9 turns to an exploration of the repeated history of plaintiffs harmed by gun violence to sue defendant actors in the firearms industry: gun manufacturers, distributors, sellers, and traffickers. The chapter begins with a statistical description of the toll of gun violence in the United States, documenting deaths, murders, suicides, and accidental injuries resulting from use or misuse of guns. The firearms industry has long been immunized from lawsuits based on the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which provided blanket immunity from suit to the firearms industry. Courts have dismissed virtually all firearms litigation in the 20th and 21st centuries, pursuant to PLCAA. The chapter discusses the applicability of PLCAA exemptions, and how plaintiffs have attempted to exploit the predicate statute exception to pursue public nusiance claims against gun defendants. Courts typically have disallowed firearms litigation under the predicate statute exception. The chapter ends with an analysis of recent legislative initiatives in New York, New Jersy, Delaware, and California to enact firearms public nuisance statutes to come within the PLCAA predicate statute exemption.

Leisure time and social affairs were of paramount importance for enslaved people; in these spaces they developed positive personal identities and meaningful relationships with others. The significance of competition in leisure activities, however, with its attendant emphasis on contest, and even conflict, meant the identities forged in these spaces were neither static nor fixed in time. Competition involves putting your reputation on the line and, regardless of any sense of shared honor through participation, to lose is to be publicly revealed as having been mastered by another. Enslaved people who had valued their physical prowess or mental aptitude as allowing them to demonstrate themselves as the best in the community might struggle in the face of challenges from younger rivals or simply from time itself. Younger members of the community might see in their elders a rival to supplant, and, in doing so, a hierarchy they might stand atop. Such conflicts demonstrate the necessity of intersectional analysis when exploring enslaved social dynamics and identities, wherein age must be incorporated as much as the well-studied categories of gender, class, and race.

Chapter 8 contains an in-depth case study of the opioid mass tort litigation in federal and state courts. It describes the inception and development of the opioid drug crisis and how the opioid crisis affected state and local municipalities, in requiring additional expenditures of money to provide medical, policing, and various social services to communities affected by the crisis. The chapter describes the initiation of opiod litigation, the hundreds of lawsuit, consolidation and transfer of all the opioid litigation into a federal MDL under Judge Dan Polsters supervision in the Northern District of Ohio. The chapter chronicles the management and litigation in the federal MDL proceedings and Judge Polsters approval of a public nuisance claim which actually went to trial. The chapter narrates the resulting, cascading opioid settlements with opioid manufacturers, distributors, and pharmacies concurrent with and after the MDL bellwether public nuisance trial. The chapter further chronicles the fate of opioid public nuisance in state courts, with a notable rejection of a public nuisance claim by the Oklahoma Supreme Court. The chapter ends by documenting the many state court opioid settlements during 2021-2022.

Intergenerational disputes shaped by white southerners’ hopes to profit from slavery did not end with the death of an enslaver. These contests became particularly virulent when the matter revolved around posthumous manumissions, and this chapter shows how elderly enslavers who sought to emancipate enslaved people in wills had their actions challenged by rivals who utilized the discourse that conflated old age with weakness, both of body and mind, to diminish their reputation and deny their mastery. The aging process had public and political ramifications in a slave society built on dominance and mastery, and a focus on emancipation and age serves as a fitting end to this study which underlines the wider importance of age as a vector of power in the antebellum south. Contests over emancipations underscore how far understandings of aging as a period of declining force led to conflict between white southerners looking to rise at another’s expense. White enslavers looked to their aged peers who sought to free their slaves as reduced in authority and status, and as figures whose claims to mastery must be usurped for the good of both private and public interests associated with slavery.

This chapter traces the historical derivation of private and public nuisance law, extending back to 12th century England, where a public nuisance was considered to be an offense agains the Crown. As such, nuisance was considered to be a criminal act, punishable by the sheriff purusant to police powers. Over time public nuisance expanded to embrace activities such as lotteries, unlicensed plays, disorderly houses of prostitution, noxious odors, higway interferences, and many other offenses. In the 16th century a crime of public nuisance gave rise to a private tort if the plaintiff could show he sustained injuries that were different in kind from those suffered by the general public. This special injury requirement carried over into modern public nuisance jurisprudence. Over time nuisance law subsumed elements of criminal law, tort law, and property law. Modern American public nuisance law developed with the American Law Institutes Restatement (Second) of Torts, in 1979. The ALI Restatement (Third) has consierably limited the modern concept of public nuisance law, excluding its applicability to product cases.

Hundreds of grassroots protests have taken place across the United States under the banner of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement since 2013. These protests were frequently animated by populist rhetoric that questioned both the performance of elected officials, chided the middle class for leaving the poor behind, and rejected the “respectability politics” that defined earlier movements for racial justice. In short, the core activists of the BLM movement are attempting to invent a new fiction of African American peoplehood that “centers the most marginal” members of the community. This chapter examines the extent to which the rise of the BLM movement has generated fissures in African American public opinion. The main finding is that public opinion on the effectiveness of the BLM movement is segmented by age, gender, and income.