The History of Mass Torts: From Plane Crashes to Pharmaceutical Litigation

Mass tort litigation feels like a permanent fixture of American law, but it is remarkably young. The tools courts now use to handle thousands of similar injury claims — coordinated discovery, consolidated pretrial proceedings, bellwether trials — were invented within living memory, case by case, disaster by disaster. Knowing that history helps explain why today's claims work the way they do.

The story usually starts in the 1960s with commercial aviation. When a passenger jet crashed, hundreds of victims and families suddenly had claims against the same airline, the same aircraft manufacturer, and the same parts suppliers. Lawyers began representing those passengers on an organized, structured basis rather than one retainer at a time. These became known as "mass accident" cases: a single catastrophic event, at one place and one moment, injuring many people at once. A 1977 tragedy — the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Kentucky, which killed more than 160 people — produced one of the first tort class actions and showed courts that ordinary one-plaintiff procedures simply could not absorb disasters of that scale.

The 1970s introduced a harder problem: mass exposure. Vietnam veterans began reporting serious illnesses they attributed to Agent Orange, the dioxin-based herbicide sprayed during the war. Unlike a plane crash, the injuries surfaced years after exposure, scattered across every state, with causation fiercely contested. Because most claimants had been in military service, the cases landed in federal courts across the country — and were eventually consolidated for pretrial handling under a then-novel mechanism called multidistrict litigation, or MDL. The Agent Orange litigation also previewed another recurring pattern: after years of fighting, it settled on the eve of trial.

Asbestos litigation, which also took shape in the 1970s, became the largest and longest-running mass tort in history. Asbestos had been used in a nearly endless list of products by a huge number of manufacturers and distributors, so the litigation seemed practically unlimited — and decades later, it still has not fully ended. Asbestos taught the legal system hard lessons about defendant bankruptcies, trust funds for future victims, and what happens when the number of claims outruns the assets available to pay them.

Tobacco followed in the 1990s, ending in the landmark 1998 Master Settlement Agreement between the major cigarette makers and the states. And then the center of gravity shifted to pharmaceuticals. As the FDA moved to faster approval tracks for new drugs, a wave of medications reached the market and were later recalled — roughly a dozen in the span of a few years around the turn of the millennium, including Rezulin and Baycol. Each recall produced its own coordinated litigation, and drug and medical-device cases have dominated the mass tort landscape ever since.

That is the era we are still in. Modern dockets include claims over talcum powder, contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, PFAS firefighting foam, herbicides like paraquat, recalled CPAP machines, and medications from Zantac to GLP-1 drugs — plus a new generation of cases against online platforms whose design or negligence harmed children and passengers. The subject matter keeps changing; the machinery built over the last sixty years is what makes these claims possible at all.

For an individual claimant, the takeaway from all this history is simple: you are not filing into a void. When you submit a claim in an established mass tort, you are joining a process the courts have spent decades refining — one designed so that a single person, without paying anything up front, can hold a global corporation accountable alongside thousands of others while keeping their own individual case and their own individual recovery.