While the discussion was legislative, involving asbestos liability and committee approval of a bill with little chance of becoming law, it illustrates how the high-profile New York indictment is becoming a tort reform talking point.
However both represent a wider international trend of addressing anti-corruption through legislative responses and extending liability and enforcement beyond national borders.
The United States wants India to enact a legislative measure limiting the liability of foreign companies in the event of a nuclear accident.
Sometimes, publication will be the answer; at other times, it will be a muscular inspection regime, or need legislative changes to enforce legal liability.
But the Justice Department warned that growing and distributing marijuana was still against federal law, and said that "state employees who conducted activities mandated by the Washington legislative proposals would not be immune from liability".
The speech and debate clause of the Constitution shields senators and representatives from civil and criminal liability in the performance of their legislative duties.
The trend away from voluntary reports towards mandatory social reporting for global corporations is here to stay and may represent a first step towards increased legislative requirements, ultimately backed up by government enforcement and serious liability for corporate wrong-doers.
In his public remarks, Mr. Bush made scant, if any, reference to his legislative failures on Capitol Hill, including the energy and the medical liability bills, which passed the House last year but failed in the Senate.
But examples of the way concussions are handled in one community in Washington, regarded as perhaps the most enlightened state on the issue, demonstrate the limits of such legislative action and how persistent football culture, as well as questions of legal liability and resources, can leave young athletes in danger.
And if the Senate process isn't done absolutely correctly, clever defense attorneys are adept at using a legislative investigation and any legal slip-ups as technicalities to foreclose more serious liability down the road.
