Is the N.F.L.’s Concussion Settlement Broken? - The New York Times

Dr. Robert Stern, Boston University center

for study of Ttrauumatic bain injury

has hope that ithin a decade CTE will be

diagnosable in living people,not just the dead at autopsy.

The short answer is Yes.  The Supreme Court should take the case and hold that it is impermissible for a settlement to bar those whose causes of action have not yet accrued.  Accrual means sufficient reason to believe  that you have suffered both harm and a wrong that are causally related. - GWC

Is the N.F.L.’s Concussion Settlement Broken? - The New York Times

by Joe Nocera

...If we are, in fact, going to have the ability to diagnose the disease in living football players within the next decade, shouldn’t the N.F.L. and the plaintiffs’ lawyers want to use that diagnostic tool, whatever it turns out to be, to figure out who does and does not have C.T.E.? And wouldn’t they want to compensate football players who could show they had the actual disease that even the league acknowledges is related to head trauma?

Yet there is nothing in the settlement that offers that possibility. Twenty years from now — assuming Stern and others have succeeded in creating an accurate C.T.E. test — players with the diagnosis who exhibit the classic C.T.E. symptoms of anger, suicidal tendencies and so on will still get nothing from the settlement because they’ll have the “wrong” symptoms. Only when they get Alzheimer’s, which has nothing to do with football, will they be eligible for compensation.



I’ve listened to Seeger and others talk about how this was the best deal the players could have gotten, given the state of the science, the possibility of having the case thrown out of court, the lines in the sand the N.F.L. drew and so on. That’s all well and good.  But if you’re going to settle lawsuits that are about a disease called C.T.E., wouldn’t you insist that the settlement have something to do with, well, C.T.E.? This one does not.