When MDL Judges Overreach:
Opioid cases, without jurisdiction, held in judicial purgatory
From 1990 to 2017, about 218,000 deaths linked to overdoes of prescriptive opioids led to a surge of lawsuits.[1] With the proliferation of cases against opioid manufacturers, federal and state courts created multidistrict litigation (“MDL”) courts to handle this influx of actions, and tensions between state sovereignty and federalism concerns have arisen.
