During the latter half of 2011, I was privy to the following exchange between a well-known law professor and a well-known practitioner:

PROFESSOR: Yes, I wrote a piece which concluded that the class action is dead. You heard it here.
PRACTITIONER: And yet plaintiffs keep filing the things …

That exchange (which I promise actually

 As both plaintiffs and defendants get more sophisticated, the problem of how to litigate mass torts grows more complicated. In particular, both litigants and courts struggle with the question of when a verdict should have preclusive effect in mass tort litigation, and when it should not. Before he passed away last year, Vanderbilt law professor