The Supreme Court may toss out Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy settlement
FORTY YEARS ago Owen Fiss, a legal scholar, wrote an article called “Against settlement”, about lawsuits’ social purpose. Big civil disputes of public import, he argued, are about more than money damages. Rather, they present a chance for collective reckoning: airing harms, assigning fault, upholding values. Trials render judgments about conduct. Private settlements, by contrast, might buy peace while leaving justice undone.
The trade-offs between accountability and money are at the heart of how to handle the firm that helped spawn America’s opioid epidemic, as well as its former owners: Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. On December 4th the Supreme Court will consider whether a bankruptcy settlement resolving claims against Purdue and the Sacklers, hashed out over several years, can go ahead. Abbe Gluck, a professor at Yale Law School, and her colleagues note that the case addresses the very conflicts raised in “Against settlement”: justice or compensation for some victims of America’s opioid crisis, which still claims 80,000 lives a year.
In 1996 Purdue began selling OxyContin, a highly addictive opioid painkiller that it advertised as safe. Even as concerns grew about abuse of the drug, the firm downplayed them and marketed it aggressively, turning OxyContin into America’s most prescribed branded narcotic pain-reliever. By the early 2000s lawsuits against Purdue were piling up.
2023-11-30 10:24:54
Source from www.economist.com
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