## Facts

- The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owned the World Trade Center when a terrorist bomb detonated in its underground garage on February 26, 1993, causing deaths, injuries, and extensive property damage.
- The Port Authority alleged the bomb was made using defendants’ fertilizer-related chemical products, including ammonium nitrate, urea, and nitric acid.
- The complaint alleged the products, in their single-chemical form, were not dangerous and functioned as ordinary fertilizers, but could become explosive when combined and processed.
- The Port Authority claimed the manufacturers knew or should have known of the risk of explosive misuse based on prior ammonium nitrate incidents and foreign regulation.
- The Port Authority asserted defendants should have designed the products to be “non-detonable” and provided warnings or distribution controls to limit purchases to legitimate agricultural use.
- The Port Authority sued under negligence and products-liability theories (design defect and failure to warn).
- The district court dismissed the complaint under Rule 12(b)(6), and the Port Authority appealed.

## Issues

1. Whether fertilizer manufacturers owe a tort duty to a property owner injured when terrorists criminally repurpose otherwise lawful, nondefective fertilizer products to build a bomb.
2. Whether the terrorists’ intentional bombing constituted a superseding, intervening cause that negated proximate causation as a matter of law.
3. Whether the complaint plausibly alleged a design defect or failure-to-warn theory when the products were safe for intended agricultural use and became dangerous only after criminal alteration and combination with other chemicals.

## Decision

- The Third Circuit affirmed the dismissal for failure to state a claim.
- The court held defendants owed no legal duty under New York or New Jersey law to protect the Port Authority from terrorists’ extraordinary criminal misuse of standard fertilizer products.
- The court held the terrorists’ intentional, criminal acts were a superseding cause that broke the chain of proximate causation.
- The court rejected products-liability theories because the fertilizers were not alleged to be defective or unreasonably dangerous for their intended use, and liability could not rest on a duty to make the products “non-detonable” or to prevent downstream criminal misuse through warnings and controls.

## Legal Principles

- Foreseeability alone does not create a tort duty; duty and proximate cause limit liability to harms within the legally recognized scope of risk.
- A manufacturer is generally not liable when a nondefective product or component is materially altered and used for an extraordinary, intentional criminal purpose that produces the harm.
- Intentional criminal acts by third parties ordinarily operate as a superseding, intervening cause, cutting off liability absent special circumstances tying the risk to the defendant’s conduct.
- Design-defect and failure-to-warn liability ordinarily require a defect or unreasonable danger in the product as marketed for intended or reasonably expected uses, not danger arising only from sophisticated criminal transformation.
- Tort law does not impose on sellers of common lawful commodities a general obligation to police distribution or redesign products to prevent all conceivable weaponization.

## Conclusion

The Third Circuit held that manufacturers of ordinary, nondefective fertilizer products were not liable for losses from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing because they owed no duty to prevent terrorists’ criminal repurposing of the products and, in any event, the terrorists’ intentional act was a superseding cause that defeated proximate causation and products-liability theories.


Port Authority of N.Y. & N.J. v. Arcadian Corp., 189 F.3d 305 (3d Cir. 1999)