Huntington Ingalls May Get Contractor Defense Via Clarified Test

Huntington Ingalls Inc. may defend in federal court a ship worker’s claims that the company failed to warn of asbestos dangers on a U.S. Navy ship after the full Fifth Circuit found the company adequately raised an immunity defense as a federal contractor.

The court overturned a three-judge panel’s ruling that no “causal nexus” existed between Huntington Ingalls’s work under the direction of the federal government and the plaintiff’s injuries.

Such a nexus is no longer required between a defendant’s acts under color of federal office and a plaintiff’s claims after Congress amended that section of the removal statute, the ...