Mistakes, the Passage of Time, and the Public Welfare

The National Transportation Safety Board or “NTSB” quite definitively laid responsibility for the tragic collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007 on an initial design error decades before.

The state of Minnesota sought to impose liability on the initial designers and passed legislation to enable the state to recover against the initial designers notwithstanding the passage of time.  The state courts saw no problem with this.  Neither did the U.S. Supreme Court which, today, denied the designer’s petition to review the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision.