Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
Public nuisance claims have driven multi-billion-dollar settlements against opioid and tobacco companies over harms to public health. Moreover, state and local governments have filed a torrent of recent public nuisance actions against, eg, firearm companies over gun violence, fossil fuel companies over climate change, and e-cigarette companies over teenage vaping.

These actions remain vigorously contested, with skeptical courts and scholars arguing that no principled criteria specify when public nuisance liability can be imposed. Courts have accordingly reversed large jury verdicts over, or categorically foreclosed, product-based public nuisance. By contrast, proponents have justified product-based public nuisance by reasoning that the nature of a ‘public right’ should be construed broadly or that private-public nuisance actions advance efficient deterrence.

This manuscript argues that public nuisance rightly plays a critical role in addressing widespread product-related harm. It proposes an alternative framework that emphasizes not the nature of a public right or who has private rights of action, but instead whether and when product-related harm or conduct along product supply chains constitutes an unreasonable interference. Conducting a novel survey of product-based public nuisance cases, the manuscript identifies three distinct forms of product-driven interference. It then analyzes the unreasonableness of these three forms by pluralistically drawing on both utilitarian and deontological regulatory standards.

Embracing public nuisance as economic regulation, this manuscript aims for a principled public nuisance doctrine that deters and redresses product-driven societal harm while avoiding the conceptual amorphousness that critics accuse public nuisance of having.

Maury, Matthew, When Products Interfere: An Interference Approach to Product-Based Public Nuisance (January 31, 2026), Southern California Law Review, Volume 100, Forthcoming 2026.