LAWYER AND PATRIOT John Adams once argued: “Facts are stubborn things, . . . and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and the evidence.”

In their Aug. 19 Commentary piece “R.I.’s high court dumps on your kids,” three Motley Rice law-firm members, Fidelma Fitzpatrick, Bob McConnell and Jack McConnell, denounced the Rhode Island Supreme Court for its decision in the lead-paint case. But by substituting “the dictums of [their] passions” for a vital “stubborn” fact essential to understanding the decision, they invite an unfair and unwarranted disrespect for the court.

The authors’ central claim was that the court engaged in an “incredibly sweeping regression of established law” and “overturned and ignored centuries of public-nuisance law.” No serious lawyer, judge, or legal scholar would contend that the application of public-nuisance law to the manufacture of a product is in any sense “established law.”

In fact, then-Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse described the state’s public-nuisance claim as “ahead of the cutting edge” (“Judge upholds bulk of paint suit,” news, April 3, 2001), and the authors themselves have described it as a “wacky idea” (Brian C. Jones, “Will ‘Fidelma’s Wacky Idea’ Survive an Appeal?,” Boston Phoenix, Feb. 28, 2007).

Appellate courts in Illinois, New Jersey and Missouri had previously rejected the same public-nuisance theory advanced by the attorney general in this case. And the state’s lawyers admitted to the court during oral argument that no American jurisdiction, be it Rhode Island or anywhere else, had ever extended public-nuisance law to the extraordinary lengths they were asking the court to take it — to the manufacture and distribution of lawful products, made many decades ago and over which the manufacturer no longer possessed any control.

The court’s conclusion, that the state’s public-nuisance theory was both factually and legally meritless, is well supported by decades of settled law from Rhode Island and around America.

Far from “overturn[ing] and ignor[ing] centuries of public-nuisance law,” the court simply rejected Motley Rice’s invitation to obliterate the decades-settled distinction between public-nuisance and product-liability law. As the court correctly recognized, the essential nature of the state’s claim was that defendants allegedly placed an unsafe product — lead pigment — in the stream of commerce.

Rhode Island, like all other jurisdictions, has an established body of law for adjudicating the rights of persons harmed by an allegedly defective product — product-liability law — designed specifically to hold manufacturers liable for harmful products. The authors conveniently ignore that the state’s product-liability claims were all dismissed, some by the trial justice and some voluntarily. The state instead chose to champion a public-nuisance idea, “ahead of the cutting edge,” even though public nuisance “focuses on the abatement of annoying or bothersome activities” and historically applies only to such public resources as air, land and water.

Rejecting the invitation to eradicate the distinct and long-settled boundary between public-nuisance liability and product liability was the right thing for the court to do. All Rhode Islanders — individuals and businesses alike — rely upon the consistency, predictability and stability of the law to plan and conduct their everyday affairs. Product manufacturers require the operation of stable, consistent rules of law that clearly define the boundaries within which they may legally design, make and sell their goods.

Recognizing the importance of these values, the court observed that the common law serves the important social value of stability, and that “although the common law does evolve, that evolution takes place gradually and incrementally and usually in a direction that can be predicted.”

The Supreme Court’s decision says as much about the court’s view of itself, in what it has referred to as the “theater of Rhode Island government,” as it does about the common law of public nuisance. The court recognized that the result sought by the attorney general could only be achieved by the court’s abandoning its constitutionally defined role — that of interpreting the law.

Certainly the Motley Rice lawyers, with their significant personal financial stakes in the outcome of the case, would have welcomed a different result, but as the court recognized, a judge is “not a knight errant roaming at will in pursuit of his own idea of beauty or goodness,” nor do judges have “a commission to solve society’s problems, as they see them, but simply to decide cases before them according to the rule of law.”

The members of the court deserve respect, not scorn, for keeping focused on their constitutional role and the principle of the rule of law, and being guided by both — a quality that all Rhode Islanders should welcome in their judges.

Thomas R. Bender is a lawyer with Hanson Curran LLP, Providence. Gerald C. DeMaria is a lawyer with Higgins, Cavanaugh and Cooney, Providence. They represent Millennium Holdings LLC, one of the defendants in the suit against paint makers.