ANALYSIS: Social Media’s Next Tobacco Parallel: The Forum Fracas

The next big skirmishes in early social media addiction litigation will stem from the national yet deeply local role that social media occupies in American life, forcing courts to confront where these cases belong, which judges will hear them, and how aggressively litigants will try to shape both. Similar fights shaped tobacco litigation after the industry’s first major settlement of addiction charges.

Before litigants call their first expert witness to testify in any mass tort, they could spend years fighting over where the cases belong in the first place. Geography, judicial philosophy, removal strategy, multidistrict consolidation, plaintiff selection, and increasingly ...