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Personal injury mass torts, like litigation over asbestos exposure or opioid addiction, put a unique strain on the judicial system, overwhelming dockets and creating complex, protracted litigation that can create financial uncertainty for defendants and functionally deny claims to litigants who are often suffering from severe health issues. Efforts to resolve the biggest, most complex mass torts through existing judicial aggregation have yet to meaningfully survive appellate review because of due process, fairness concerns, and the strictures of American civil procedure, with the Supreme Court’s decision in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma being the latest potential blow.

This Note will argue that stakeholders—parties, their attorneys, judges, and policymakers—should prioritize resolving mass torts via Claims Resolution Facilities rather than seeking the distant prospect of global aggregative relief via class actions, multi-district litigation, or bankruptcy. In doing so, it joins an early wave of work incor- porating the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma, L.P. into aggregation doctrine. It also builds on existing scholarship on Claims Resolution Facilities by highlighting a recent success: a Facility used to resolve claims in the Monsanto Roundup multi-district litigation.

Aggregation has been unable to effectively provide a template for efficient, fair resolution of complex personal injury mass torts. This Note will chart the doctrinal history of aggregation’s limitations and contrast it with Claims Resolution Facilities’ historical ability to effectively resolve mass torts. It will then conclude by discussing best practices in Claim Resolution Facilities design and uplifting two models for future stakeholders to consider.

The doctrine of personal jurisdiction is in a precarious state. The Supreme Court’s most recent attempt to apply its “settled principles” of personal jurisdiction to the evolving world of complex litigation left the law anything but settled. Specifically, in Bristol-Myers Squibb v. Superior Court of California, San Francisco County, the Court held that California courts could not constitutionally exercise personal jurisdiction over claims in a coordinated mass action that were not transactionally related to the state. The potential implications of BMS’s reasoning for class actions are profound: Applying BMS’s logic to absent class members’ claims would severely hinder plaintiffs’ abilities to sue on behalf of nationwide classes. An abundance of scholarship has since sought to divine whether BMS spells the end of nationwide class actions. The lower courts have divided on the question, with both the majority and the minority relying on simple definitions of absent class members as either parties or nonparties. This Note articulates an alternative to the formalistic are-they-parties-or-not inquiry and, instead, resolves the question by returning to personal jurisdiction’s first principles. It begins by tracing the evolution of personal jurisdiction doctrine back to its animating principles of sovereignty and due process. Applying them to the class action context, this Note concludes that adherence to the requirements for class certification inevitably allows courts to resolve absentee claims over which they would otherwise lack personal jurisdiction without running afoul of the sovereignty and due process principles that underlie personal jurisdiction doctrine.

In mass tort multidistrict litigation (MDL), existing scaling-up devices have failed to generate significant efficiency gains. This essay suggests a novel device: issue presumption. Where courts possess the greater power to apply issue preclusion, courts may instead apply issue presumption to shift the burden of persuasion against the losing party in subsequent cases. By scaling up through this softer, more flexible approach, MDL courts can capture lost efficiency gains.