Aggregate Agency Adjudication

By Professor Adam Zimmerman

Prof. Zimmerman is guest blogging on Prawfsblawg, where this post originally appeared.

At Yale's Journal on Regulation, Chris Walker highlights our project on Aggregate Agency Adjudication with the Administrative Conference for the United States. Michael Sant’Ambrogio and I are studying agencies that experiment with class actions, trials by statistics, and other aggregate litigation techniques to resolves lots of cases in their own courts. As we discuss in The Agency Class Action, 112 Colum. L. Rev. 1992 (2012), agencies don't do this very often. And there are lots of reasons why. But, we want to see if agencies can use aggregate adjudication along with other tools -- rulemaking, informal guidance, stare decisis and ADR -- to resolve cases more effectively.

I've already described Medicare's new pilot plan to use "trials by statistics" to alleviate its 500,000+ case backlog. So, here's another example: the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. Congress created this program in the 1980s to provide people injured by vaccines with a no-fault alternative to lawsuits in federal court. In theory, an "Office of Special Master" must decide whether to compensate someone in 240 days based on a showing that the vaccine caused the injury. But see Nora Freeman Engstrom, A Dose of Reality for Specialized Courts: Lessons from the VICP, 163 U. Pa. L. Rev. _ (forthcoming 2015) (finding, among other things, that it takes longer than that). Many claims proceed one at a time, like most benefit programs. But when over 5,000 parents claimed that a vaccine additive, called Thimerosal, caused autism in children, the Vaccine Program used three “omnibus proceedings" to pool together all the individual claims that raised the same highly contested scientific questions in front of just three adjudicators. As it happens, the Vaccine Program has used coordinated proceedings like this for more than 20 years.

Even though the Act that created the vaccine program contains no provision for class action suits or anything like it, the program developed the concept of the omnibus proceeding on its own because the "same vaccine and injury often involve the same body of medical expertise." Counsel representing large groups of individual claimants often use an omnibus proceeding to answer questions of "general causation," like whether a particular vaccine is capable of causing a specific injury. The issue of whether it did so in a specific case can then be resolved more expeditiously. I'll provide a few more details about this process below, but can you think of other agencies that assign large groups of individual similar cases to the same adjudicator for similar reasons? What are strengths and weaknesses of this kind of approach? The Vaccine Program uses two types of omnibus proceedings. The first involves common vaccines and injuries--applying evidence developed in the context of one or more individual cases to other cases involving the same vaccine and the same or similar injury. See, e.g., Capizzano v. Sec’y, HHS, 440 F.3d 1317 (Fed. Cir. 2006). The second involves hearing evidence on a general theory of causation--like does a rubella vaccine cause chronic arthritis or other categories of joint problems? The special master makes findings based on that evidence and orders the parties to file papers establishing the extent to which the facts of individual cases fit within the courts general findings. See, e.g., Ahern v. Sec’y, HHS, No. 90-1435V, 1993 U.S. Claims LEXIS 51 (Fed. Cl. Spec. Mstr. Jan. 11, 1993). For example, counsel representing a large number of petitioners and counsel for respondent may file expert reports and medical journal articles to support the theory that the rubella vaccine is associated with chronic arthritis. The special master then (1) conducts a hearing in which the medical experts testify, (2) publishes an order setting forth the conclusions, and (3) files it in each of the rubella cases. If he finds sufficient evidence that the rubella vaccination could cause chronic arthropathy under certain conditions, he may order individual petitioners seeking compensation to establish those conditions in a separate filing.

According to one special master, however, most omnibus proceedings work like bellwether trials in federal district court--organizing individual cases that raise similar issues in front of the same adjudicator, in the hopes that a big outcome settles aspects of the remaining cases:

Most omnibus proceedings ... have involved hearing evidence and issuing an opinion in the context of a specific case or cases. Then, by the agreement of the parties, the evidence adduced in the omnibus proceeding is applied to other cases, along with any additional evidence adduced in those particular cases. The parties are thus not bound by the results in the test case, only agreeing that the expert opinions and evidence forming the basis for those opinions could be considered in additional cases presenting the same theory of causation.

The use of the omnibus proceeding is thus less binding than the "all-or-nothing" approach of the class action. But there are some drawbacks. First, some agencies, even if they wanted to, may not be able to adopt omnibus proceedings like the Vaccine Program. Many agencies use administrative law judges, who are assigned randomly to each individual case to minimize bias and to prevent gamesmanship. Second, omnibus proceedings raise interesting questions about the legitimacy of using an adjudication process to settle complex scientific questions. Not only were many plaintiffs in the autism proceedings anxious about commencing cases together, so were members of the public heath community, who "found it unsettling that the safety of vaccines must be put on trial before three "special masters"" in an obscure vaccine court. Said one: "the truth about scientific and medical facts is not, ultimately, something than can be decided either by the whims of judges or the will of the masses."

To be fair, however, those concerns aren't unique to mass litigation, or for that matter, agencies that rely on rulemaking procedures, scientific panels, or even, the Center for Disease Control to resolve tough scientific questions. And, in the case of vaccines and autism, a significant test for the limited resources of the vaccine program, at least some found that the ability to hear common cases together led to deliberations that represented a "comparatively neutral exhaustive examination of the available evidence." But such concerns still raise the question about the best way to efficiently and consistently pool information about many common claims without sacrificing legitimacy, compromising due process, or magnifying the risk of error.