This UK paper on multiparty litigation looks at the Opren case. This concerned an anti-arthritic drug licensed in the UK between 1980 and 1982. While a number of drug users died, the most common adverse reaction was photosensitivity. The main legal action involved almost 1,500 plaintiffs and seven defendants. In the early summer of 1987 a court ruling on the funding of the action meant that 500 of the plaintiffs might have to withdraw. With the help of a multimillionaire and a media campaign, the parties reached a controversial settlement at the end of 1987. This paper focuses on the plaintiffs' case, the way the litigation proceeded through the courts and the nature of the settlement. It goes on to assess the problems the case highlighted in court procedures, legal aid and liability for defective drugs.
This paper looks at the O p r e n case and goes on to try to draw lessons about the way that group actions can be handled in the English courts, how they should be financed and their application to drug disasters. The issues in group claims are not simply a blown-up version of the access to justice issue for they throw up peculiar dilemmas of their own as this paper shows. H o w e v e r group claims inevitably force the interested observer back to basic principles -what is the role of the courts, what is the role of the state as against that of the individual, what is the object of the tort system.
The paper gives a simplistic overview of the O p r e n case and discusses some of the developments it has pointed to. A n y reader interested in the implications of class actions and in the questions they raise about basic principles should read A g e n t Orange on Trial (Schuck, 1987) which details the six year US class action against the manufacturers of the defoliant used in the Vietnam war. In spite of the lessons that such a detailed study can bring home, no such study is likely to emerge from any U K group case. This is partly because the U K is not as open a society as the US is. There is no freedom of information law in the UK. It is partly because the rules of discovery and on interrogatories in US litigation have fewer restrictions on what information litigants can obtain from one another than the rules in the U K and Europe. A n d it is partly because the terms of any settlement in a U K group claim are likely to be confidential, as they were in the O p r e n case.