Cite as: 527 U. S. 815 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
dence and made an independent finding at some point in the proceedings. The same, however, cannot be said for the value of the disputed insurance.
The insurance assets would obviously be "limited" in the traditional sense if the total of demonstrable claims would render the insurers insolvent, or if the policies provided aggregate limits falling short of that total; calculation might be difficult, but the way to demonstrate the limit would be clear. Neither possibility is presented in this case, however. Instead, any limit of the insurance asset here had to be a product of potentially unlimited policy coverage discounted by the risk that Fibreboard would ultimately lose the coverage dispute litigation. This sense of limit as a value discounted by risk is of course a step removed from the historical model, but even on the assumption that it would suffice for limited fund treatment, there was no adequate finding of fact to support its application here. Instead of undertaking an independent evaluation of potential insurance funds, the District Court (and, later, the Court of Appeals), simply accepted the $2 billion Trilateral Settlement Agreement figure as representing the maximum amount the insurance companies could be required to pay tort victims, concluding that "[w]here insurance coverage is disputed, it is appropriate to value the insurance asset at a settlement value." App. to Pet. for Cert. 492a.29
ties, less transaction costs. App. to Pet. for Cert. 377a, 492a. In 1997, however, Fibreboard was acquired for about $515 million, plus $85 million of assumed debt. See In re Asbestos Litigation, 134 F. 3d 668, 674 (CA5 1998) (Smith, J., dissenting); see also Coffee, Class Wars: The Dilemma of the Mass Tort Class Action, 95 Colum. L. Rev. 1343, 1402 (1995) (noting the surge in Fibreboard's stock price following the settlement below).
29 In describing possible limited funds in this case, the District Court discounted the $2 billion Trilateral Settlement Agreement figure by the amount necessary to resolve present claims included in neither the inventory settlements nor the global class claims and other items, yielding a figure equal to the $1.535 billion available under the Global Settlement Agreement. App. to Pet. for Cert. 492a. The Court of Appeals, by contrast, assumed that the full $2 billion represented by the Trilateral Settle-
851
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