By Carl Salisbury, Bramnick Rodriguez Grabas Arnold & Mangan LLC ( May 12, 2017, 12:11 PM EDT) -- Beginning in the early 1980s, an explosion of litigation across the country occurred, in which corporate policyholders sought insurance coverage for billions of dollars in defense and indemnity for environmental liabilities. The passage by Congress in 1980 of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, or CERCLA, was the catalyst for an ensuing cottage industry in coverage lawsuits. Corporate policyholders large and small received "Potentially Responsible Party" letters from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and from state departments of environmental protection, holding them strictly liable for the creation, transportation and disposal of hazardous wastes at thousands of private and municipal landfills across the country. A small handful of visionary lawyers in those early days believed — correctly, as it happens — that the standard comprehensive general liability insurance policy that essentially every company in America had been purchasing since the 1940s might provide coverage for this new kind of statutory liability....