The Borel v. Fibreboard case file (1969-1972)

The district court file from Borel v. Fibreboard Paper Products Corporation, Civil Action No. 6449 in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division. This is the case that first held asbestos manufacturers strictly liable for failing to warn the insulators who used their products. The file holds 278 documents and 3,682 pages, from the complaint filed in October 1969 through the record for the appeal in 1972, including Clarence Borel's deposition, the six volumes of the trial transcript, the jury instructions and the verdict.

How the file is organized

The documents are grouped by stage of the case: the docket, the pleadings, motions and orders, discovery, depositions, the trial, post-trial motions and the appeal, settlements, and correspondence. Within each stage they're listed by date, with the party that filed each one. The documents most worth reading first are marked as key documents. Every document is searchable, so you can also open one and search it for a product, a company or a job site.

Clarence Borel's own story, and what his case still means for families today, is told in Clarence Borel: the case that changed everything. Ward Stephenson's earlier case for another Gulf Coast insulator, Claude Tomplait, which went to trial against Fibreboard and lost in May 1969, is in the Tomplait v. Combustion Engineering case file. His case for Samuel Potter, which ran alongside Borel's and settled during trial in February 1972, is in the Potter v. Fibreboard case file.

The pathology report

The only page we've published from Clarence Borel's medical records is a pathology report from St. Elizabeth Hospital, dated February 5, 1969. The pathologist examined fluid drawn from around his lung and found "atypical cells, possibly malignant." The tissue that was biopsied was clear, and the report doesn't name mesothelioma. Today, a pathologist would run immunohistochemical stains on cells like these to tell mesothelioma apart from other cancers. The rest of his medical records and his death certificate are not published.

About these copies

We bought the complete file from the National Archives. The scans were cleaned up and made searchable, which took them from 2.7 GB to 171 MB, and 41 exact duplicates were removed. The file names are our own: abbreviations are written out (FB is Fibreboard, JM is Johns-Manville, PC is Pittsburgh Corning) and obvious typos are fixed. A few documents carry no date and are listed last in their stage. One of them is a copy of the first amended complaint that was marked as Plaintiff's Exhibit GF-2391.