Plaintiffs' lawyers flagrant abuse of public nuisance law is breaking our court system

There’s a quiet revolution taking place in the law, powered by a sleepy old common law theory called public nuisance, and it is on the cusp of causing a breakdown of the American tort system.   

In the litigation over opioids, plaintiffs used public nuisance as a cause of action to get around the fact that the manufacture, distribution and sale of opioids was allowed by law and subject to exacting federal regulations. But there was a twist: Trial lawyers combined private plaintiffs with hundreds of state...