Whether imposing massive and retroactive 'public nuisance' liability without requiring proof that the defendant's nearly century-old conduct caused any individual plaintiff any injury violates the Due Process Clause

QUESTIONS PRESENTED Petitioners (or their predecessors) are two of the dozens of companies that promoted lead pigments for use in house paints from the late-nineteenth to midtwentieth centuries, when interior residential use of lead paint was both lawful and widespread. Now, decades later, the decision below has deemed those lawful activities a “public nuisance,” and has ordered petitioners to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to remedy the continued existence of lead paint inside residences constructed before 1951 in ten of the most populous counties in California. This massive judgment was not imposed because petitioners’ paint was traced to any such residence. Instead, the linchpin for imposing this massive liability was petitioners’ speech, not their paint. Yet plaintiffs were expressly relieved of any need to demonstrate that anyone relied on the speech for which petitioners were held liable. In fact, plaintiffs stipulated that they had no proof of reliance, and the trial court expressly held that no such proof was required. Instead, under the legal ruling below, it was enough that petitioners (or their predecessors) promoted lead paint for interior residential use during the first half of the twentieth century. In short, petitioners were ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to remediate a decades-old problem that plaintiffs were not required to trace to either petitioners’ paint or their speech. The questions presented are: 1. Whether imposing massive and retroactive “public nuisance” liability without requiring proof that the defendant’s nearly century-old conduct caused any ii individual plaintiff any injury violates the Due Process Clause. 2. Whether retroactively imposing massive liability based on a defendant’s nearly century-old promotion of its then-lawful products without requiring proof of reliance thereon or injury therefrom violates the First Amendment.