N.D. Fla.'s. Mixed Bag Of Vaginal Mesh Daubert Rulings

It is an old legal adage that hard cases make bad law. One could also say that big cases make bad law, especially if by "big" we include Multi-District Litigation (MDL) cases. When a federal judge is suddenly in charge of thousands of cases, that judge will too often start thinking more like a manager than a scholar. The emphasis is on disposition of the inventory. That means settlement. Consequently, we get decisions, or often non-decisions, that are designed to foster settlement, not resolve complex legal issues in an intellectually coherent way.

But then something strange happens near the end of the life-cycle of MDLs. After the bulk of the cases are settled, there remains a "tail" of cases or about-to-be-filed cases. Those cases are holdouts. They are in the hands of plaintiff lawyers who are opportunistic and/or recalcitrant. At this point, the MDL judge gets a wee bit irked, seeing these holdouts as standing in the way of ending the MDL and giving the