§ 214-b.Action to recover damages for personal injury caused by contact with or exposure to phenoxy herbicides.

CPLR 214-b addresses a problem the ordinary three-year rule in CPLR 214 couldn't handle: injuries from Agent Orange and similar phenoxy herbicide exposure during the Vietnam era often didn't surface for years or decades after the exposure itself. Measuring the deadline from the exposure date, as the general rule would, meant many veterans' claims were already time-barred before the injury was even diagnosable.

The section instead gives a veteran who served as a member of the U.S. armed forces in Indo-China between January 1, 1962 and May 7, 1975 two years to sue, running from actual discovery of the injury or from when reasonable diligence should have revealed its cause — whichever comes later. That discovery-based approach protects a veteran whose latent injury takes years to connect back to service-era exposure.

CPLR 214-b was the first of several sections built around this same discovery logic. The legislature generalized the approach five years later in CPLR 214-c for latent toxic exposure claims of all kinds, and returned to it decades afterward in CPLR 214-i-B for post-9/11 veterans exposed to toxic burn pits. Together, these three sections form a family of military and toxic-exposure statutes united by the same idea: the clock should start when the injury and its cause become knowable, not when the exposure happened.