Legal term
Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML)
Updated Jul 19, 20262 sources
In a sentence
The seven-judge federal panel that decides whether related lawsuits across districts become an MDL, and which judge runs it. It publishes monthly statistics on every active MDL — the closest thing mass torts have to a scoreboard.
The Chief Justice appoints seven judges, no two from the same circuit. The Panel hears centralization motions roughly every two months and typically rules within weeks. Since inception it has created more than 1,800 MDL dockets and denied more than 790 centralization motions.
The JPML's monthly 'Pending MDL Dockets' reports are the primary public record of docket sizes. People's Justice archives every report — the JPML itself only retains about two years of history.
