Monica Potts on why litigation following the oil spill will likely be as unprecedented as the disaster itself:
The scope of the disaster and the number of people it is likely to directly affect, from fishermen to homeowners to restaurant and hotel employees is unprecedented. The costs of clean up have already soared to $1.25 billion. But what’s really unprecedented is the future ecological damage that states may struggle to quantify.
“It’s not easy to value human health, absolutely, but we have been trying to do that for centuries in personal injury cases,” says says Nina Mendelson, a professor from the University of Michigan School of Law. “We have a lot less practice trying to value shared environmental resources damaged in an irreplaceable way.”