LEGALISSUES
Major Exposure Posed by the Retroactive Revival of Liability for Design Errors by Shawn E. Goodman, Sabo & Zahn, Attorneys at Law
The United States Supreme Court recently declined to take up a decision from November 2011 which upheld a Minnesota statute passed in order to allow for the resurrecting of professional design defect liability which had expired many years earlier. The case, Jacobs Engineering Group, Inc. v. State of Minnesota, drew the interest of a number of construction organizations, including the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Associated General Contractors of America, which sought to have the Court take up the issue of whether legislation which allowed for the revival of defect liability after the statue of repose had passed violated the due process clause of the Constitution.1 The Jacobs Engineering case arose from the collapse of part of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis. That bridge spanned the Mississippi River; and its collapse tragically resulted in the deaths of thirteen as well as the injury of another 145 innocents. The cause of the collapse has yet to be determined, although design error by the engineer and failure to maintain by the Minnesota Department of Transportation are two distinct, and not mutually exclusive, possibilities. Indeed, the bridge had been regularly inspected and classified as structurally deficient every year from 1991 to 2007. During that same time period, the bridge’s superstructure was declared to be in poor condition: “Superstructure has advanced deterioration. Members may be significantly bent or misaligned. Connection failure may be imminent.” Nat’l Transp. Safety Bd., Accident Report: Collapse of I-35W Highway Bridge, Minneapolis par Minnesota, August 1, 2007 49 - 50 (Nov. 14, 2008). Importantly, at the time of the collapse, approximately 160,000 cars were daily passing over the bridge, which had been built to carry only closer to 60,000. Barry B. LePatner, Too Big to Fall: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward 5 (2010).
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LICENSED ARCHITECT • VOL 16 NO. 3 • FALL 2012