Asbestos Suits Transferred to Philadelphia : Litigation: A judicial panel said the district is ‘either expressly favored or not objected to’ by the most parties in the suits.

A judicial panel on Monday ordered that 26,639 federal lawsuits across the country alleging injury or death from asbestos be shifted to U.S. District Court in Philadelphia for pretrial proceedings.

That court is the one “either expressly favored or not objected to” by the most parties in the suits, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation said.

The proceedings will be supervised by U.S. District Judge Charles R. Weiner. Weiner is thoroughly familiar with the issues and willing to undertake the task, the panel said.

If he believes that any cases should be transferred to his court for trial, the panel said it will order the transfers.

It was the sixth time since 1977 that the panel considered transfer of asbestos litigation to a single court in the interests of efficiency. The previous rejections were for different reasons and did not necessarily involve the same cases.

The cases involve a tangle of lawsuits alleging thousands of deaths, millions of injuries and claiming billions of dollars in damages stemming from the widespread use of asbestos in building materials.

“In a docket of this size and scope, no district emerges as the clear nexus where centralized pretrial proceedings should be conducted,” the panel said in a 17-page opinion.

The Philadelphia court has 5,703 asbestos cases pending, the most of any of the 87 judicial districts where such cases are on file. Next in number are the northern district of Ohio with 4,022, Massachusetts with 2,630, southern district of New York with 1,441 and the eastern district of Texas with 1,165.

By contrast, the districts of eastern California, northern Florida, northern Indiana and Wyoming have only one case apiece.

The judicial panel is a statutory court that consolidates cases for pretrial proceedings. Its members are senior district judges and judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals.

“The actions in this litigation involve common questions of fact relating to injuries or wrongful death allegedly caused by exposure to asbestos or asbestos-containing products,” the panel said.

Earlier this year, a committee appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist looked at the problem clogging the federal court system. The committee concluded that it had become “a disaster of major proportions to both the victims and the producers of asbestos products which the courts are ill-equipped to meet effectively.”

The committee noted that the asbestos story “is a tale of danger known in the 1930s, exposure inflicted on millions of Americans in the 1940s and 1950s, injuries that began to take their toll in the 1960s and a flood of lawsuits beginning in the 1970s.”

It said a continuing stream of claims can be expected and cited predictions that there may be 200,000 asbestos disease deaths before the year 2000 and as many as 265,000 by the year 2015.