Why 90 percent of US baby formula lawsuits landed in two Illinois counties

Lawsuits against infant formula manufacturers have surged in recent years, alleging that specialized preterm formula causes necrotizing enterocolitis, a serious intestinal disease that strikes premature babies. This month, the first federal bellwether trial of the multi-district litigation reached a verdict: The jury heard the plaintiff’s evidence, weighed it and found that the prescription formula had not caused the infant’s untimely death. 

Every one of these cases begins with a family that lost a child or nearly did, which is of course always devastating. But the most revealing pattern in this litigation has nothing to do with medicine. It has to do with geography: not with where these tragedies occurred, but with where the lawsuits are filed.

Roughly 90 percent of the nation’s baby formula claims have been filed in two Illinois counties: Madison and St. Clair. Both sit across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, with a combined population of just over 500,000.

Later this fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether to take up the question at the heart of that concentration: how state courts may reach in dragging out-of-state companies before its judges.

The cases piled into those two courthouses have almost no connection to them. The infants were not treated there. The families do not live there. In the case now before Supreme Court justices, the manufacturer moved its operations from Illinois to Indiana in 2018, but an Illinois court said it........

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