By Patrick Bedell and Kevin Harris ( January 15, 2019, 3:45 PM EST) -- The opioid epidemic has given rise to thousands of lawsuits against manufacturers, distributors and retailers of prescription opioids. Today, state and local governments have filed over 1,700 such lawsuits, which seek to recover billions of dollars they have spent to address the opioid epidemic, including costs for government services ranging from police overtime to neonatal care. The problem with these claims, as Connecticut state court Judge Thomas Moukawsher recently explained in his ruling in City of New Haven v. Purdue Pharma, et al.,[1] is that the causal link between the manufacture of opioids and the costs for emergency and social services borne by municipalities is too attenuated. In addition, he observed, government plaintiffs cannot possibly prove which municipal expenditures were caused by which defendant. In his ruling, Judge Moukawsher refused to assign liability to pharmaceutical defendants by (what he terms) "junk justice" and dismissed lawsuits filed by 37 municipal plaintiffs. As we discuss further below, his ruling may have far-reaching impact upon thousands of other opioid lawsuits pending across the country, as well as the liability insurers to which those claims have been tendered....