New York State Electric & Gas Corporation v. Secretary of Labor and Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that the Secretary “must first make out a prima facie case before the affirmative defense comes into play”
• holding that unforeseeability and unpreventibility are affirmative defenses and citing authority from the First, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuits in support of this proposition
• knowledge may be satisfied by proof that employer, with the exercise of reasonable diligence, could have known of the presence of the violative condition
• “We note that under the Commission’s precedent, ... the Secretary’s prima facie case and the employer’s unpreventable conduct defense both involve an identical issue: whether the employer had an adequate safety policy.”
• “[A] party cannot normally show that it suffered prejudice simply because of a change in its opponent’s legal theory. Instead, a party’s failure to plead an issue it later presented must have disadvantaged its opponent in presenting its case.”
• discussing Pennsylvania Power & Light and Mountain States

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).