What began as a single opioid lawsuit in Ohio is now the only such case that matters. Every significant opioid lawsuit in the U.S. has been lumped together into a giant case before one federal judge in Cleveland who has declared his extraordinary ambition to “solve” the crisis in 2018. Pretrial issues are usually not subject to review by higher courts, giving the MDL judge still more power. Judge Polster captured the scope of his ambitions in a January hearing on the opioid cases: “What I’m interested in doing is not just moving money around, because this is an ongoing crisis. None of those are going to solve what we’ve got.”Is a federal courtroom, presided over by a single judge, a better forum for making policy than 50 state legislatures or Congress?

Source: Wall Street Journal May 07, 2018 22:18 UTC