Dial painter's estate lost to U.S. Radium on a two-year filing deadline, court opinion shows

La Porte v. United States Radium Corporation, an opinion from the District of New Jersey reported at 13 F. Supp. 263 and captured from the Caselaw Access Project, is the paperwork at the end of a wristwatch. The estate of Irene F. La Porte, a dial painter, asked the court for an injunction that would stop the United States Radium Corporation from pleading a filing deadline against a damages action at law. The court refused. "The bill must be dismissed," the opinion states.

The popular account of the dial painters runs the other way. HistoryNet publishes the story, and it draws two consequences from the women's fight. Their perseverance, the piece states, "set a precedent in case law for the right of individual workers to sue employers for damages caused by labor abuse." Afterwards, it continues, federal laws made occupational diseases compensable and "extended the time during which workers could discover illnesses and make claims." The captured page attaches no name to either sentence, so both are recorded here as the publication's. Wikipedia's article on the Radium Girls puts the first half more flatly: the right of individual workers to sue corporations over labor abuse "was established."

The product under all of this was a consumer good. Radium paint made a watch dial legible in the dark, and the dials were painted by hand. Wikipedia's article states that the brushes lost shape after a few strokes, and that supervisors encouraged the workers to point them with their lips - "lip, dip, paint" - or their tongues. HistoryNet describes the women as fatally poisoned by the glowing paint they used on the job.

The opinion sets out La Porte's employment to the day: from May 14, 1917 to December 11, 1918, and for a further period of not over six weeks in 1920. The evidence showed she was in good health when she left the company, the court found. In October 1930 the pains in her legs and joints began. Dr. Harrison S. Martland, the chief medical examiner of Essex county, N. J., determined on October 15, 1930 that she was a victim of radium necrosis. Her claim for damages was first presented to the company on May 4, 1931 - about eleven years after the last of the work, and about six weeks before her death on June 16, 1931.

Against that sequence sat a clock. The provision quoted in the opinion requires actions for injuries caused by the wrongful act, neglect or default of a corporation to be commenced within two years after the cause of action accrued. The quoted text says only "within this state" and names no state; the opinion places its medical witness in Essex county, N. J., which is the basis for reading the provision as New Jersey's. That reading is an inference from the opinion, not a line of the statute. Lapse of time, the opinion states, is a positive and legal bar.

The estate's route around the clock was equitable fraud. In cases of fraud, the opinion notes, the limitation period does not begin to run until the fraud is discovered. The court declined to apply the exception, and the reason is the part of the record that does the most work. The company was utterly ignorant of the harmful effects attendant upon its factory process until 1924, the opinion finds, when its attention was directed to an alleged case of radium necrosis suffered by one of its former employees. Martland first established the danger in the dial-painting industry in 1924 or 1925; before 1924 it had not been suspected. A duty to disclose a hazard that, so far as the company or the world knew, did not exist was not a duty the court would impose. In 1920, the opinion states, dial painting was not known to be a hazardous occupation.

What the opinion does not settle matters as much as what it does. It is not a finding of fraud; the court expressly declined to make one, and its account of the company before 1924 is one of ignorance rather than concealment. It is not a ruling on whether the damages action would have succeeded on its facts. What was dismissed was the bill in equity that sought to keep the limitations defense out of the case. The opinion records the human position and then declines to act on it: there is no question where the sympathies of any human being would lie in a case of this sort, it states, and this is an extraordinary case even today. The remedy it points to is not judicial. "Only forward looking, intelligent legislation can protect future situations such as the one here presented."

The settlement that made the story famous is documented elsewhere. NIST records that in 1925 five of the women filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Radium Corporation, based in Orange, New Jersey, and that the company's offer of $10,000 plus payment of doctors' bills and a yearly pension of $600 was accepted by the ailing women on June 4, 1928. HistoryNet gives the same terms and adds that the annuity ran until death, and that the settlement came days before a June trial date. Wikipedia puts the sums at roughly $188,000 and $11,300 in 2025 money, the pension paid at $12 per week.

Five women settled. The opinion describes the decedent as one of eighty girls who worked for five and one-half days per week in a large factory room. The opinion's count for that room is eighty.

Read as analysis, the two records are not describing the same thing. The 1928 settlement was a payment to five claimants; a settlement decides nothing as law. The one decision in this file that did have to state a rule of law states the opposite of the reform claim: the two-year bar held, the discovery-of-fraud exception was refused, and the court said the fix belonged to a legislature. The court in 1935 acknowledged the sympathy the case commands and still pointed to legislation as the only protection for future situations; the contrast with the precedent-setting role that later accounts assign to the litigation is this desk's observation, not the court's. The two literatures do not cite each other. The celebrated settlement and the forgotten dismissal share a defendant, a factory floor and, in La Porte's case, a room of eighty.

Nothing here contradicts the record of what the paint did, or the account of the brush being pointed at the lip. The narrow point is about the legal clock on a consumer product's harm. Exposure ran 1917 to 1920; the hazard was established in 1924 or 1925; the diagnosis came in October 1930 and the claim in May 1931. Measured from the work, every one of those dates is outside two years.

One thing is checkable on a date. This desk expects, at medium confidence, that on March 1, 2027 the HistoryNet page will still carry both sentences as captured - no correction, no qualifier alongside the claim about extended discovery time. Anyone can open the page that day and see. The other check is older and slower: 13 F. Supp. 263 is a published federal opinion, it is free to read at the Caselaw Access Project, and it says in its own words what the court believed only legislation could repair.