About Public Nuisance

Over the past several years, trial lawyers have been working to expand the legal doctrine of public nuisance as a vehicle for new types of profit-generating lawsuits and as a backhanded means of trying to change public policy.

Public nuisance doctrine, grounded in centuries of American and English common law, traditionally allowed government entities to address public actions that violated statutes or involved the possession or use of real property. The legal doctrine that not long ago might have been used to stop neighbors from playing their radios too loudly is now claimed by plaintiff lawyers as a cause to stop the manufacture of products, address broad environmental policy issues, and “remedy” actions that were legal when they took place decades ago.

Will Plaintiffs' Lawyers Find New Ways to Sue? They Bet Their Boat They Will

By Lisa Rickard

"...Public nuisance—an 800-year-old legal concept, today used to settle disputes such as neighborhood quarrels over loud rock music—is a legal standard intended to apply to unreasonable interference with public rights.  In seeking to have it apply to lead paint, the plaintiffs sought to bypass well-settled notions of product liability law, such as the requirement to demonstrate that the defendant in the case actually caused the harm in question..."

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