Multidistrict Litigation and the Field of Dreams.

This Article analyzes the so-called Field of Dreams problem in multidistrict litigation (MDL). Once an MDL is up and running, the story goes, plaintiffs' lawyers flood the proceeding with meritless claims in the hopes that they will be swept into a global settlement before anyone ever looks closely at them. Critics have called this the most pressing problem with MDLs today and lobbied both Congress and the Federal Rules Committee for MDL-specific rules to address it. This Article analyzes the empirical and normative dimensions of the MDL Field of Dreams. While the empirical evidence behind existing complaints about meritless claims in MDL is exceedingly thin, the economic intuition behind the phenomenon is quite plausible: if you reduce the cost of litigation, as MDL does, more claims with lower expected values will enter the system. Assuming, then, that some significant portion of those new claims are meritless, this Article asks, what, exactly, is wrong with that? It examines several potential problems an influx of meritless claims could create from both the defendants' and plaintiffs' perspectives. While some of these concerns are serious, others are overblown. And the types of claims that garner the most criticism-those filed by people who have not been exposed or injured-are actually the least problematic. Many of the real problems that the Field of Dreams creates can be addressed through private ordering and case management techniques that are within the existing powers of the MDL judge and do not require a radical overhaul of MDL procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]