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ALF's top-ranked Amicus Program has scored another victory in the U.S. Supreme Court. On June 5 the Court issued a unanimous opinion reversing the First Circuit in Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc. v. Estados Unidos Mexicanos (23-1141). The opinion has far-reaching implications for manufacturers whose products may be criminally misused.
The Mexican government had sued heavily regulated U.S. firearms manufacturers for $10 billion in damages and sweeping injunctive relief to redress “social costs” that it alleges to have incurred as a result of gun violence in Mexico. According to Mexico’s complaint, filed in Massachusetts federal district court, the defendant manufacturers have knowingly “aided and abetted” Mexican drug cartels, which have smuggled American-made firearms into that country, and “proximately caused” the violence that the drug cartels have perpetrated there.
The district court dismissed Mexico’s action based on the broad immunity-from-suit that Congress has afforded to U.S. firearms manufacturers under the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 (PLCAA), 15 U.S.C. §§ 7901-7903. But a First Circuit panel reversed, holding that the litigation can proceed under a narrow exception because Mexico’s aiding-and-abetting allegations are “not implausible.”
The Supreme Court's opinion, authored by Justice Kagan, holds that "Mexico’s complaint does not plausibly allege that the defendant manufacturers aided and abetted gun dealers’ unlawful sales of firearms to Mexican traffickers." More specifically, the Court explained that "Mexico has not adequately pleaded what it needs to: that the manufacturers participate in those sales as in something that [they] wish[] to bring about,” and “seek by [their] action to make” succeed.
This is consistent with ALF's amicus brief, which argued that aiding-and-abetting liability requires a corporate defendant to engage in affirmative and culpable misconduct, and that neither knowledge of product misuse nor failure to prevent it is enough. The brief was co-authored by ALF Executive Vice President & General Counsel Lawrence Ebner and John Parker Sweeney, a senior partner, and product liability and firearms litigation specialist, at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP.
Although the Court's opinion airises under an industry-specific federal immunity statute, its discussion of aiding-and-abetting liability has broader significance for numerous types of manufacturers whose products may be criminally misused by third parties.
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