Mass Actions: Bankruptcies, MDLs, Class Actions &

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Federal courts have been grappling with the problem of mass actions for decades. Balancing fairness, access to justice, and efficiency is an ongoing challenge. Beginning with class actions in 1966 and multidistrict litigation in 1967, US courts have allowed for mass aggregation. Increasingly, in the 21st century, bankruptcies too have been used to resolve an extremely large volume of claims. The opioid crisis has been perhaps the most dramatic of the mass torts that US courts have attempted to resolve. Beginning with a large multidistrict litigation and evolving into a large bankruptcy action, opioid cases have played a dominant role in the new cycle, law firms’ business books, and law reviews’ pages. In June 2024, the Supreme Court decided Harrington v. Purdue, effectively sending the bankruptcy action back to square one. How will our legal system move forward, both in this case, and in mass actions more generally?