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The Bankruptcy Of Purdue Pharma In The Wake Of Big Tobacco, Jacob Hedgpeth

University of Colorado Law Review Forum

Two distinct public health crises shook the United States from 1954 to 2023: nicotine addiction from tobacco products, and opioid addiction starting with Purdue Pharmaceutical’s OxyContin. These crises resulted in millions of deaths and immense costs to the country as a whole. The nicotine crisis ended in a national settlement against four major tobacco manufacturers, which yielded hundreds of millions of dollars for those harmed by these products. The owners of Purdue, however, opted for bankruptcy instead of settlement, keeping the majority of the money made from OxyContin for Purdue’s owners, the Sackler family.

These four tobacco giants and Purdue …

Misreading Menetti: The Case Does Not Help You Avoid Liability For Your Own Fraud, Val D. Ricks

St. Mary's Law Journal

Several decades ago, an incorrect legal idea surfaced in Texas jurisprudence: that business entity actors are immune from liability for fraud that they themselves commit, as if the entity is solely responsible. Though the Supreme Court of Texas has rejected that result several times, it keeps coming back. The most recent manifestation is as a construction of Texas’s unique veil-piercing statute. Many lawyers have suggested that this view of the veil-piercing statute originated in Menetti v. Chavers, a San Antonio Court of Appeals case decided in 1998. Menetti has in fact played a prominent role in the movement to …

Choice Of Law And The Preponderantly Multistate Rule: The Example Of Successor Corporation Products Liability, Diana Sclar

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Most state rules of substantive law, whether legislative or judicial, ordinarily adjust rights and obligations among local parties with respect to local events. Conventional choice of law methodologies for adjudicating disputes with multistate connections all start from an explicit or implicit assumption of a choice between such locally oriented substantive rules. This article reveals, for the first time, that some state rules of substantive law ordinarily adjust rights and obligations with respect to parties and events connected to more than one state and only occasionally apply to wholly local matters. For these rules I use the term “nominally domestic rules …