It's Not over 'Til It's over: Mandating Federal Pretrial Jurisdiction and Oversight in Mass Torts

Nearly twenty years ago, speaking of the difficulties inherent in managing mass tort cases, Chief Justice William Rehnquist predicted that without coordinated state and federal mechanisms, lawyers would "seek to pursue duplicative and exhaustive litigation." And some courts, "operating under a parochial view of the situation," would allow them to do so. He warned that the result would be "expense, delay, resulting crowding of dockets, divergent decisions on identical factual questions, and sometimes the insolvency of the defendants who are being sued." Despite this and similar warnings, expensive and exhaustive litigation is exactly what has happened in many cases.