## Facts

- Twenty-six New Jersey public entities (municipalities and counties) sued manufacturers and alleged successors of lead pigment and lead-based paint producers.
- Plaintiffs alleged defendants historically manufactured, promoted, and sold lead-based paint while misrepresenting or concealing health hazards.
- Plaintiffs claimed widespread lead paint in residential housing created ongoing public health harms and imposed public costs (inspection, code enforcement, healthcare interventions, and abatement).
- The complaints asserted fraud, public nuisance, civil conspiracy, unjust enrichment, and indemnification.
- The actions were designated and managed as a mass tort proceeding in the trial court.

## Issues

1. Whether public entities may use common-law public nuisance to obtain damages or abatement funding from lead paint manufacturers for governmental costs tied to lead hazards in housing.
2. Whether the municipal cost recovery rule bars tort recovery of routine governmental expenditures absent statutory authorization.
3. Whether claims seeking redress for harm from a product must proceed, if at all, under the New Jersey Products Liability Act rather than being recast as public nuisance.
4. Whether the Lead Paint Act and related statutory schemes limit or displace a broad common-law nuisance remedy for legacy lead paint hazards.
5. Whether plaintiffs sufficiently alleged proximate causation and defendant control to support public nuisance liability where defendants neither own nor control the affected properties.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of New Jersey reversed the Appellate Division and reinstated the trial court’s dismissal of the public nuisance claims.
- The Court held the public entities could not maintain the asserted public nuisance actions to recover lead-hazard-related governmental costs from manufacturers.
- The Court concluded the municipal cost recovery rule barred recovery of ordinary public expenditures (e.g., inspection and enforcement) absent legislative authorization.
- The Court determined the dispute was fundamentally product-based and could not be pursued by relabeling it as public nuisance to avoid product-liability requirements.
- The Court held plaintiffs failed to plead a legally sufficient causal and control nexus between defendants’ historical product sales and present conditions in privately owned residences.
- Because the revived nuisance claim failed, the dismissals left all claims dismissed.

## Legal Principles

- Government entities generally may not recover, through tort, the costs of performing ordinary governmental functions (such as inspection, enforcement, and public health responses) without specific statutory authorization (municipal cost recovery rule).
- When alleged harm arises from a product, New Jersey’s products liability framework supplies the governing theory; plaintiffs may not avoid that framework by styling product-based allegations as public nuisance.
- Public nuisance liability requires more than historical manufacture and sale of a lawful product; it requires a sufficient connection in causation and a form of control over the nuisance’s instrumentality or the property from which it arises.
- Remote causal chains involving decades-old product distribution and multiple intervening actors are insufficient to establish proximate cause for public nuisance damages and abatement costs.
- Courts should not recognize remedies that effectively reallocate policy choices already addressed by comprehensive legislative schemes governing lead hazards, absent clear legislative authorization.

## Conclusion

The New Jersey Supreme Court held that public entities could not use common-law public nuisance to shift lead paint abatement and related governmental costs to manufacturers, because such recovery was barred as ordinary public spending, governed by product-liability law, and unsupported by adequate allegations of control and proximate causation within the Legislature’s lead-hazard regulatory framework.


In re Lead Paint Litig., 191 N.J. 405, 924 A.2d 484 (2007)