Texas Law Review

Journal containing articles, notes, book reviews, and other analyses of law and legal cases. Topics in this issue covers legal realism, the DREAM Act, property taxes and community land trust, and Multi-district Litigation settlements

Mass Litigation Governance in the Post-Class Action Era: The Problems and Promise of Non-removable State Actions in Multi-district Litigation

Given a string of decisions restricting the use and availability of the class action device, the world of mass litigation may well be moving into a post-class action era. In this era, newer devices of aggregation—perhaps principally among them multi-district litigation (“MDL”)—increasingly will be called upon to meet the age-old mass litigation goal of achieving global peace of numerous claims arising out of a related, widespread harm. Indeed, coordination of pretrial proceedings in the MDL frequently facilitates the achievement of this peace, given the reality that cases, once consolidated in the MDL, often settle en masse. However, one clear obstacle to the achievement of aggregate peace in the MDL, one that also plagues the achievement of that peace in the class action world, is our federal system of substantive and procedural law. In the MDL context, the problem arises because litigation involving state-law claims and non-diverse parties, which are not removable from state court, cannot be transferred to the MDL court. Despite their prevalence, little scholarly attention has been devoted to non-removable state-court actions in MDL. The few responses to this issue have largely focused upon the efficiencies that could be gained through increased, and perhaps total, consolidation of all related cases or, short of consolidation, through heightened coordination of pre-trial proceedings between state and federal judges. This article questions whether these responses have led reform proposals in the wrong direction, and instead takes a different view. Rather than argue for increased consolidation, I offer for further consideration the possible ways in which the happenstantial existence of parallel tracks of related state and federal cases actually hold promise, if properly harnessed, as mechanisms for achieving the goals of aggregate litigation and for disciplining the contours of global settlements of mass disputes. In particular, I explore the possibility that the existence of parallel state and federal cases—frequently viewed as an obstacle to global resolution of claims unable to be consolidated in a single forum—may well fortuitously provide an opportunity to achieve the sorts of mass litigation resolution envisioned but unsuccessfully attempted in the class action context. In so doing, this article adds new thoughts and theories to the specific debate regarding parallel state and federal claims in MDL, as well as to the larger debate about mass litigation governance in a post-class action world

Bellwether Trial Selection in Multi-District Litigation: Empirical Evidence in Favor of Random Selection

For decades, courts overseeing mass tort litigation have struggled with how to identify the right plaintiffs for early trials. These initial trials, often called “bellwether” trials, are intended to help the parties evaluate the merits of other cases in the same litigation. But a successful bellwether process depends heavily on the method by which the trials are selected. A process that all litigants regard as fair and that results in the selection of plaintiffs who are representative of the claims of other plaintiffs can help to facilitate the resolution of an entire mass tort docket, whereas a process that is unfair or that results in a sample of plaintiffs whose claims are outliers in either direction will not. To explore these issues in more detail, Part II of this article begins with a brief overview of the history and purpose of the bellwether trial process. Part III summarizes the various methods that courts and litigants have used to select bellwether plaintiffs and describes the theoretical advantages and disadvantages of each. Part IV presents our empirical analysis from the Bextra and Celebrex litigation. Ultimately, we conclude that if a party selection process both produces unrepresentative bellwether cases and disadvantages one party disproportionately, then such a process cannot fulfill the fairness and information-gathering purposes of bellwether trials. Accordingly, we urge courts to employ random selection procedures where possible

Foundational and Contemporary Court Confidentiality

An integrated confidentiality system now pervades American dispute resolution. This system was created over the course of decades by legislatures, rule makers, and courts. Proponents of confidentiality have long justified expansive secrecy by claiming that the benefits of withholding litigation information outweigh any potential public harm. Recent evidence undermines this premise. In some of the most important public-harms cases of the past two decades, critical health-and-safety information was kept secret in court files. People died or were injured in the meantime. It has also become apparent that consolidating cases in multi-district litigation has the potential to accelerate and homogenize confidentiality nationally. The recent evidence of these trends is concerning and would prompt any conscientious observer to reconsider the status quo