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Ed. note: Welcome to our daily feature, Quote of the Day.
Today’s decision is wrong on the law and devastating for more than 100,000 opioid victims and their families. The Court’s decision rewrites the text of the U. S. Bankruptcy Code and restricts the long-established authority of bankruptcy courts to fashion fair and equitable relief for mass-tort victims. As a result, opioid victims are now deprived of the substantial monetary recovery that they long fought for and finally secured after years of litigation. …
Opioid victims and other future victims of mass torts will suffer greatly in the wake of today’s unfortunate and destabilizing decision. Only Congress can fix the chaos that will now ensue. The Court’s decision will lead to too much harm for too many people for Congress to sit by idly without at least carefully studying the issue. I respectfully dissent.
— Justice Brett Kavanaugh, “respectfully but emphatically” dissenting in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, where he was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, as the Supreme Court’s majority threw out the existing bankruptcy plan for OxyContin’s maker, ruling that the bankruptcy code does not permit the Sackler family from being released from future opioid litigation claims without the “consent of affected claimants.” Kavanaugh went on to say that due to the Court’s decision, “each victim and creditor receives the essential equivalent of a lottery ticket for a possible future recovery for (at most) a few of them,” further noting that without these releases, “there is no good reason to believe that any of the victims or state or local governments will ever recover anything.”
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on X/Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.