A federal judge in Atlanta has refused to allow multidistrict litigation arising from salmonella-tainted peanut butter to proceed as a class action.
Certifying hundreds of product liability cases as a class action against ConAgra — the producer of Peter Pan and Great Value peanut butter — would make little sense because doing so in these cases would neither clear the courts of thousands of similar, individual suits nor effectively compensate plaintiffs with claims too small to litigate, said U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. in an order entered July 22.
