Four years ago, when one of the cohosts of this blog was slogging away on the first edition of Statewide Coordinated Proceedings: State Court Analogues to the Federal MDL Process (Thomson-West 2d rev. ed. 2004), we would have given anything for a resource that gathered information about how the fifty states handled mass torts. We scraped together the material for the book by doing legal research, talking to colleagues, calling courts, and begging for help — there was no resource that pulled the relevant material into one place.
The National Center for State Courts has now created precisely what we needed back in 2003. The NCSC knows all the right people to call in the various state court systems; it put those contacts to use by sending out a survey to all fifty states asking how the states handle mass torts. NCSC collected the results of that survey on a single website, which is a wonderfully valuable resource.