Is a company liable for "potential" harms?

Question

Case 1, you hired the Company to build your house. However, the in-door air quality does not meet the standards. While there is no short term harm to your health, there might be a long term harm which is hard to prove.

Case 2, you bought and ate some food from the Company and the food turn-out to be contaminated. You have no immediate symptoms; however, there might be long term consequences.

In these kinds of cases, how can one firmly prove to the court that the Company has liability for long-term potential harms or other liabilities?

Reference: 3 high profile workplace VOC violation lawsuits that cost companies millions of dollars

In the first two cases, the Company paid a settlement because the victims actually caught cancer. Say you were in the same scenario, and suffered from the poor in-door air quality; however, due to your own immune system, you did not catch cancer. Will the Company still be liable?

Answer 1

Not in tort

You have tagged your question tort. The other answers explain why there is no tort liability.

Case 1 is a breach of contract claim

Assuming that meeting minimum indoor air quality standards was a term of the contract, then the purchaser has not got what they bargained for and has a legally straightforward, although possibly technically difficult remedy: the builder fixes the problem or pays the remediation costs. This type of dispute is so common that it can be considered routine.

Case 2 is also a breach of contract claim

Again, the purchaser did not get what they bargained for: uncontaminated food.

If it hasn’t been consumed, then they are entitled to return it for a refund or replacement.

If they have consumed it, they have no case until they suffer some loss.

Not about the potential harms

Note that neither contract claim is about "liability for long-term potential harms."

Answer 2

You tagged your question "tort." A potential harm without actual harm is not actionable under tort law.

Quoting from an article "Negligence Without Harm" by Yehuda Adar and Ronen Perry in The Georgetown Law Journal, Vol 111, Issue 2 (2022):

The harm requirement is one of the most fundamental tenets of negligence law: the tort is incomplete and there can be no legal redress without proof of actual damage. Mere exposure to risk, even when it is foreseeable and unreasonable, is not actionable.

The article then goes on to argue for change to this "time-honored, deep-rooted, and highly impactful legal axiom."

Answer 3

Establishing an injury and damages from that injury is an element that must be proven to hold a company liable.

This is not purely a pro-company doctrine. The statute of limitations usually does not begin to run until the person harmed discovers an injury. So, if you don't have an injury now, but an injury arises later, you can sue within the statute of limitations period after the injury actually manifests.

If physical harm is not suffered, usually liability would be the cost of determining the environmental standards are not met, abating that problem in the building, monitoring the building to confirm that the problem is solved, and the cost of having medical tests to determine that you have not suffered injuries from the exposure and that they do not arise in the future. The cost of remediating the problem in the building will often be quite substantial.

Merely putting someone at risk of suffering an injury, sometimes called "risking" in the academic literature of torts (i.e. "civil wrongs"), is not a basis for a civil lawsuit.

Often, if the conduct puts people at risk of harm, it will violate a statute or regulation, for which a fine may be imposed in a civil enforcement action brought by the government.

Answer 4

There are other problems for the company.

Assume you hired them to build a heating/cooling system that follows building standards. They skipped a final inspection that would have found problems but charged you for it; that is fraud. Part of the danger comes from using cheap, substandard parts while charging you for high quality parts, again fraud. They didn’t produce what they promised, a safe heating/cooling system. That’s breach of contract. And it sounds like the thing state agencies might be interested in, possibly taking licenses away and closing the company down.

Now you won’t get paid damages for the health risk when no damage actually happened. Take a demolition company that takes a building down with explosives. They should make sure nobody is there during the explosion, but do nothing and it is mad luck that there is nobody actually there. They don’t pay for damages that didn’t actually happen (like 50 school children who would have died if their school bus hadn’t broken down a mile away), but they will be in plenty of trouble.