Law360, New York (November 24, 2015, 11:15 AM EST) -- Judge Eduardo Robreno has done a heroic job of resolving the "elephantine mass" of asbestos litigation stuck in the federal system (MDL 875) but his attempt to resolve an ancient Greek paradox came up short. In a memorandum opinion (Mortimer v. A.O. Smith Corp., et al.) addressing Ford Motor Co.'s motions to exclude the plaintiff's experts intent on opining that his renal cell cancer was caused by exposure to asbestos, the judge tries to draw a distinction between "any exposure" (a/k/a "every breath") and cumulative exposure yet misses, I think, the point. Meanwhile, Ford decided to run the risk factor play — by which I mean that it wants to assert as alternate causes those risk factors for renal cell cancer gleaned from the plaintiff's medical records (e.g., hypertension) while denying that asbestos isn't really a risk factor for renal cell cancer and so cannot be a cause. When everyone agrees that a risk factor is the same thing as a cause a lot of unfortunate pronouncements about science usually follow and that's very much what happened here....