Amber R. Long

The Size of the Bag

The case turned on how much a bag weighed.

Willis "Charley" Edenfield spent roughly forty years at an adhesive plant in Bloomfield, New Jersey. In a batching area about twenty feet square, he weighed and mixed dry ingredients used in manufacturing. Decades later, he died of mesothelioma — a cancer caused by asbestos and by almost nothing else.

Proving the source of that exposure required identifying whose asbestos Edenfield handled. The plant had accepted deliveries from more than one supplier, the work took place before anyone thought to create a detailed exposure record, and Edenfield was no longer alive to describe his workstation.

Amber Long reconstructed the evidence from freight records. Between 1969 and 1984, Union Carbide shipped roughly 56,000 pounds of Calidria asbestos to the plant in ten- and forty-pound bags. Another supplier used materially larger packages.

Then a surviving coworker remembered the bags Edenfield lifted. They were the small ones.

Cancer and the Warning Label

Union Carbide began placing warnings on Calidria bags in 1968. Its 1972 label stated that asbestos dust could cause serious bodily harm.

It did not say cancer. The company's medical materials had already associated asbestos with mesothelioma.

In January 2019, the jury found that the inadequate warning was a proximate cause of Edenfield's exposure and that the exposure substantially contributed to his disease. It awarded $2.38 million to his widow, Thomasenia Fowler.

June 30, 2022

The Appellate Division ruled that a new trial was required.

Long represented Fowler before the New Jersey Supreme Court. The appeal asked whether a supplier that gives safety information directly to an employer has discharged its duty to the workers who handle the product: whether telling the plant is the same as warning the person holding the bag.

On June 30, 2022, Long obtained a reversal of that ruling. The court reinstated the verdict and held that a supplier's separate communications to an employer do not relieve it of the obligation to place an adequate warning on the bags that reach workers. The court also upheld the trial court's substantial-factor causation instruction.

Fowler v. Akzo Nobel Chemicals, Inc., 251 N.J. 300 (2022), established the governing New Jersey rule on those issues. Long had tried the case and then carried it through the appeal.

The Garage in Manlius

Lewis Nash drove a school bus for the Fayetteville-Manlius district in upstate New York from 1957 until 1994. He regularly entered the garage while mechanics replaced brakes, clutches, and gaskets on buses made by International Harvester, later Navistar. Nash developed mesothelioma and died in September 2012 at eighty-one.

At the 2014 Onondaga County trial, Long led the case against Navistar. Her team used family testimony to establish where Nash went and how often, industrial-hygiene evidence about brake work in an enclosed garage, and medical evidence connecting the exposure history to his disease. Testimony about the frequency, duration, and intensity of his presence during maintenance work, set against published studies of asbestos fibers in brake dust, supplied the scientific foundation.

In December 2014, the jury returned $7.7 million. The court entered judgment of $3.47 million and left the liability findings standing, sustaining the failure-to-warn theory and finding that Navistar had not produced the evidence needed to allocate fault to settled parties.

Parts That Wear Out

Arthur Whelan worked around steam traps, boilers, valves, and automobile brakes. Some asbestos-containing components were original to those products. Others were replacement gaskets, insulation, brake linings, and packing made by third parties and installed during routine maintenance.

The manufacturers obtained summary judgment on claims involving the replacement components. The Appellate Division reversed, and Long argued as amicus curiae for the New Jersey Association for Justice when the dispute reached the New Jersey Supreme Court in November 2019.

In 2020, the Supreme Court affirmed the reversal and set out the governing rule. A manufacturer may owe a warning duty when asbestos was integral to the original product and necessary for it to function, routine maintenance required similar asbestos-containing replacements, and exposure to the original or replacement components substantially contributed to disease. The claims returned to the trial court under that standard.

The rule tied the warning duty to product design and foreseeable maintenance, even when another company made the replacement component.

The Ones Before

Long's trial record began earlier, and in other rooms.

In November 2010, as co-counsel to Jerome Block, she tried the case of a mother and son who had both developed mesothelioma from the family's engine-rebuilding and auto-mechanic business — the same asbestos, the same garage, two generations. The jury returned $1.74 million.

Twice more with Block she tried tobacco cases: $1.34 million in December 2012 for a man who started smoking as a young teenager, spent his life trying to quit, and died of lung cancer; $5.5 million in 2013 for a smoker who had started before any warning appeared on a pack or in an advertisement.

In April 2024 she tried a case in federal court in New Jersey against a gasket manufacturer, for a former Navy machinist who had spent years at a large New Jersey refinery. The defendant made no settlement offer at any point before the verdict.

Residential Treatment Facilities

In December 2024, Long and Rebecca Kimmel filed complaints on behalf of twenty former patients who said they suffered childhood sexual abuse while receiving inpatient psychiatric treatment at Four Winds Hospital locations in New York. The complaints name Four Winds Hospital and related entities and allege that staff and failures of supervision exposed young patients to abuse.

In March 2025, Long and Kimmel filed another action on behalf of twenty-three former residents of Daytop New Jersey's adolescent substance-use treatment facilities. The complaint alleges abuse by adults entrusted with the residents' care and names Daytop and state-related defendants in connection with the facilities' operation and oversight.

Practice

Long is a partner at Levy Konigsberg in New York, where she has practiced since January 2006 and has been a partner since 2017. She has tried and litigated mesothelioma cases in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Louisiana, and is admitted in New York and New Jersey, in four federal district courts, and before the Second Circuit.

She studied psychology at Cornell, graduating in 2002, and earned her law degree magna cum laude from Brooklyn Law School in 2005, where she served as Notes and Comments editor of the Journal of Law and Policy. She began her career as a court attorney to a New York City Criminal Court judge, writing opinions and recommendations.

Her cases reconstruct where a person stood decades earlier, what was in the air, which product the evidence connects to that place, and what the manufacturer knew.