Abstract
This review examines David Kinley's In a Rain of Dust: Death, Deceit, and the Lawyer Who Busted Big Asbestos, which focuses on the landmark case of Lubbe v Cape plc. Kinley's account situates the litigation within broader struggles over corporate accountability, access to justice, and post-Apartheid politics. The book stands out for combining doctrinal insights with empirical detail and storytelling, offering perspectives often absent from business and human rights scholarship. Four contributions of the book are highlighted: its analysis of litigation strategy, its demonstration of narrative's power in law, its rare empirical depth, and its exploration of litigation's impacts beyond judgments. The review argues that Lubbe not only reshaped parent company liability and jurisdictional reasoning but also exposed structural imbalances in transnational litigation. Kinley's work speaks directly to contemporary debates in transnational legal theory, including climate litigation, supply chain accountability, and the limits of strategic litigation. Keywords: transnational litigation, parent company liability, storytelling and law, access to justice, duty of care, empirical research The case of Lubbe v Cape is well known to anyone interested in transnational litigation. It involved a group of South African claimants, many of whom were former asbestos miners, suing the English-based parent company, Cape plc (Cape), for harm caused by asbestos-related diseases (ARDs) resulting from the operations of its South African subsidiaries. At the heart of the case was whether the English courts were the appropriate forum to hear a case under the doctrine of forum non conveniens, given that the harm occurred in South Africa. Ultimately, the House of Lords ruled in favour of the claimants, allowing the case to proceed in the UK. 1