The historical basis for the public Trust Doctrine

W. Keith Kavenagh was a an eminent colonial historian and founder and Director of the Institute for Colonial Studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

He was an expert witness in the litigation between the States and the United States over the offshore oil drilling rights in the seabed which was conducted by the Supreme Court of the United States. Just after completing his work on that case he left his faculty position at Stony Brook and entered Hofstra Law School, graduating in 1978, and completing a major work on Tidelands, a portion of which is excerpted below.

Then as an attorney, in 1979 he joined Yannacone in managing the Agent Orange litigation searching and organizing the hundreds of thousands of documents provided by the government and the chemical company war contractors. Eventually he established the web of knowledge about dioxin contaminated herbicides and established that no one in authority in the United States government knew what the chemical companies knew.

He passed away in 1983 but not before providing the analysis which ultimately defeated the “Government Contractor Immunity” defense of the corporated defendant war contractors who manufactured dioxin contaminated herbicides for use during the War in Southeast Asia.

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