Brief Fact Summary. Camden County (Plaintiff), a municipal county, sued Beretta, U.S.A. Corp. (Defendant), a gun company, for public nuisance.
Synopsis of Rule of Law. For the interference to be actionable, Defendant must exert a certain degree of control over the source of the nuisance.
Instead, a federal court follows the precedents of the state's highest court and predicts how that court would decide the issue presented.
View Full Point of LawIssue. As a matter of law, can a legally manufactured product placed in the stream of commerce create a nuisance?
Held. No. Judgment affirmed.
* A public nuisance is an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public. For the interference to be actionable, Defendant must exert a certain degree of control over its source. New Jersey has never allowed a public nuisance claim to proceed against manufacturers for lawful products that are lawfully placed in the stream of commerce. On the contrary, the courts have enforced the boundary between the well-developed body of product liability law and public nuisance law.
* If public nuisance law were permitted to encompass product liability, nuisance law “would become a monster that would devour in one gulp the entire law of tort.” If defective products are not a public nuisance as a matter of law, then the non-defective, lawful products at issue in this case cannot be a nuisance without straining the law to absurdity.
* To connect the manufacture of handguns with municipal crime-fighting costs requires a lengthy chain of casual connections. This causal chain is simply too attenuated to attribute sufficient control to the manufacturers to make out a public nuisance claim.
Discussion. In this case, Plaintiff attempted to phrase their claim as a public nuisance cause of action when in reality it is more of a products liability cause of action. It is important to note that a defendant must have a certain degree of control over the source of the nuisance in order for a plaintiff to maintain their claim for public nuisance. The court separated a cause of action for nuisance from that of negligence and strict products liab