Johnson & Johnson failed to get 2,400 state-court cancer lawsuits tied to its baby powder immediately transferred to a federal court in Delaware, where it could forge a single defense strategy, Bloomberg News reported. U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika dismissed J&J’s request yesterday, noting that the world’s largest maker of health care products is partly responsible for the boomlet of litigation over its transfer strategy that it now characterizes as a crisis. J&J wants to invoke the legal rights of its bankrupt talc supplier, Imerys Talc America Inc., to gather the baby powder suits before Judge Noreika in hopes of quicker trials and resolutions of claims that the talc-based product causes cancer. In February, the unit of Imerys SA sought chapter 11 protection to deal with a wave of identical suits. “J&J cannot establish an emergency’’ tied to Imerys’s bankruptcy-reorganization effort, Noreika said. “J&J’s desire to centralize its own state-law litigation does not justify the finding of an emergency” requiring immediate transfer, she added. She must still decide whether to accept the cases on a permanent basis.
