Johnson & Johnson’s bold move to skirt a US court in New Jersey and seek a potentially friendlier venue in Texas to settle claims its baby powder gave women cancer faces a key decision as soon as Thursday.
A federal judge in Texas is poised to rule whether J&J can access his Houston court, located 1,600 miles away from the company’s New Jersey headquarters, to hear the case. It marks the health-care company’s latest attempt to resolve thousands of lawsuits through a strategy involving Chapter 11 proceedings, a controversial gambit that’s been criticized by legal experts and challenged by the US Justice Department and lawyers for women who don’t support the settlement.
J&J created a corporate shell to absorb the cancer claims and file for bankruptcy, a tactic that’s already been stopped twice by the influential US Third Circuit Court of Appe