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.