## Facts

- Numerous personal-injury and wrongful-death actions alleged that Vioxx (rofecoxib), manufactured by Merck & Co., Inc., increased risks of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks and strokes.
- Federal Vioxx cases were centralized in an MDL in the Eastern District of Louisiana under 28 U.S.C. § 1407.
- Plaintiffs, acting through the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee, sought certification of a single nationwide class covering claimants from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
- The proposed class theory relied on applying New Jersey substantive law to all class members based on Merck’s New Jersey connections.
- Merck opposed certification, asserting that each plaintiff’s claims would be governed by the law of the state where the plaintiff used Vioxx and suffered injury.

## Issues

1. Whether a nationwide personal-injury and wrongful-death class could be certified under Rule 23 given individualized issues of exposure, medical history, causation, and damages.
2. Whether New Jersey substantive law could be applied classwide to claims arising across multiple jurisdictions consistent with applicable conflicts principles and due process.
3. Whether common questions predominated and a class action was superior and manageable under Rule 23(b)(3) in an MDL containing thousands of individual suits.

## Decision

- The court denied the motion to certify a nationwide class action.
- The court concluded that individualized issues concerning prescribing circumstances, medical risk factors, specific causation, and damages would outweigh common questions.
- The court determined that multiple states’ substantive laws, not a single state’s law, would govern class members’ claims, defeating predominance and creating serious manageability problems.
- The court found a nationwide class was not superior to coordinated MDL pretrial proceedings and other MDL case-management methods.

## Legal Principles

- Rule 23(b)(3) requires that common questions predominate over individual questions and that a class action be superior to other methods of adjudication.
- In multistate tort and products-liability litigation, material variations in state substantive law (elements, defenses, limitations, and damages) can defeat predominance and render a proposed nationwide class unmanageable.
- MDL centralization under 28 U.S.C. § 1407 does not unify the governing substantive law for transferred cases; each action generally retains the substantive law that would have applied in its original forum.
- Proposed class representatives whose claims arise under one state’s law may be inadequate or atypical for a nationwide class when other class members’ claims would be governed by materially different state laws.

## Conclusion

The court refused to certify a single nationwide Vioxx personal-injury and wrongful-death class because choice-of-law differences and individualized proof of causation and damages prevented predominance and manageability, and MDL procedures provided a more appropriate mechanism for handling the litigation.


In re Vioxx Prods. Liab. Litig., 239 F.R.D. 450 (E.D. La. 2006)