Of course, the family is not personally appearing — but the bankruptcy lawyers for what was Purdue Pharma know what the real stakes are: over $6 billion being kept safe, and sheltered from any consequences of the family’s decision to push highly addictive opioids, branded as OxyContin^® — not unlike street criminals — on the nation. And now hundreds of thousands of Americans have died, as a direct result.

Updated — listen to ScotusBlog’s ever capable Amy Howe on this whole debacle: “Purdue Pharma’s blockbuster opioid OxyContin first came on the market in 1996. The company conducted an aggressive marketing campaign for the drug, selling it as a relief option for a broad array of pain, from cancer to long-lasting sports injuries, and generating some $35 billion in revenue. The company suggested that because the drug was made with an outer coating to slowly release its active ingredient, it was less susceptible to abuse. But OxyContin proved to be highly addictive, leading to a serious public health crisis. Between 1999 and 2019, nearly a quarter-million people died from overdosing on prescription opioids like OxyContin, outstripping car accidents and gunshots as the leading cause of accidental death in the United States….

Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges relating to its marketing of OxyContin. Along with members of the Sackler family, some of whom were actively involved in the development and marketing of the company’s drugs, it was also a defendant in thousands of lawsuits, seeking more than $40 trillion, accusing them of having deceptively marketed the drug….”

That is, Monday of this week, the Supremes will hear argument on whether victims’ families getting a little something shortly is better than making billionaires pay in full — perhaps more than a decade from now. But make no mistake: that is what the statute as written requires: pay in full — for frauds.

So it is my view that the Jamie Sprayregen long ago engineered ingenious gaming of the federal bankruptcy residual powers, in several cases, evolving and expanding over time (in judge made “law”) — that led to the free passes for billionaires who don’t even file a chapter personally… must end.

If keeping $6 billion is allowed as an outcome for depravity on this scale… we have failed, in our claim to be a society of ordered liberty, under the law — with equality before the law. [The people with the gold cannot be allowed to just make up the rules.] Here is the latest reply brief from the US Trustee opposing the giveaway to the billionaires:

…This case concerns the reorganization in bankruptcy of respondent Purdue Pharma L.P. and its affiliates, stemming from their role in fueling the opioid epidemic that has ravaged families and communities throughout the Nation. In approving Purdue’s reorganization plan, the court of appeals relied on residual provisions of the Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. 101 et seq., to validate a sweeping nonconsensual release of nondebtors’ claims against other nondebtors — the Sacklers and a host of associated individuals and entities. That release extends to claims based on fraud and other willful misconduct that could not have been discharged even if the Sacklers themselves had submitted to bankruptcy and thereby surrendered their assets for distribution to their creditors. The plan instead permits the Sacklers, who would otherwise face claims alleging damages in the trillions, to obtain full repose while keeping billions of dollars that they siphoned from Purdue in the years before these Chapter 11 proceedings….

[The] defenses of the Sackler release illustrate the radical nature of the power they would locate in a modest catchall provision of the Bankruptcy Code. The release here unequivocally involves direct claims against the Sacklers. Those claims are private property of those claimants, but the plan disposes of them as if they were property of the estate. The bankruptcy power to modify creditor-debtor relations does not include the nonconsensual restructuring of relations among nondebtors.

Plan proponents make an equally fundamental error by conflating the subject-matter jurisdiction of courts sitting in bankruptcy — the authority to hear claims related to the estate — with the authority to deem those claims resolved for $0 regardless of their merits under applicable state law. Plan proponents invoke necessity, but necessity cannot justify taking what is not theirs….

Now you know. The NYT also has a good story on the implications, this morning… onward.

नमस्ते