Bifurcating a toxic-tort trial deprives jurors of evidence they need to date causation.

Evidence

The real problem, thought Nesson, had begun five months ago when the judge had divided the trial into separate parts. What if Schlichtmann had been allowed to present the case in its entirety? The jurors would have heard evidence about when the Woburn families first began to experience the symptoms of solvent poisoning—the chronic rashes among the children, the gastrointestinal problems, the burning eyes, the cardiac arrhythmias, and, of course, the leukemias. These symptoms all bore the fingerprint, so to speak, of the contamination in the wells. The jurors could have used this evidence to assist them in determining when the solvents first got to the wells. But the judge, in fragmenting the case, had deprived the jurors of this information. — , Harr Jonathan - A Civil Action, 2259

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the catalog’s own note that decoupling questions splits a case into parts where the whole was load-bearing.
• SEED: Directly supports ‘On Sacrifice’/‘Complaints’ style pieces: courts fragment complex causal claims and quietly bury the live evidence.