Public Nuisance

Linda S. Mullenix is the Rita and Morris Atlas Chair in Advocacy at the University of Texas School of Law. She holds a Ph.D. in political theory from Columbia University and a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Mullenix has served as a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow; a scholar-in-residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio, Italy; and the Fulbright Senior Distinguished Chair in Law, in Trento, Italy. She is an elected Life Member of the American Law Institute, the Texas Bar Foundation, and the American Bar Foundation.

Introduction; 1. Historical context of private and public nuisance at law and equity; 2. Shifting mass tort theories in the 1990s and the judicial resistance to the expansion of public nuisance liability; 3. Expanding public nuisance doctrine: inroads and retreats, the lead paint mass tort litigation; 4. Litigating public nuisance claims: burdens on plaintiffs; 5. Expanding public nuisance doctrine: defenses; 6. Expanding public nuisance: remedies beyond injunctions and abatement to monetary damages; 7. Environmental contamination, PCBs, and climate change as public nuisance harms; 8. Opioids as a public nuisance health and welfare harms; 9. Firearms violence as a public nuisance; 10. E-cigarettes and vaping as a public nuisance harms; 11. Evaluating the competing arguments regarding the contemporary use of public nuisance in mass tort litigation; Conclusion.