I'm Felix Salmon and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Friday, November the 12th, and we are focused on torts.

Don't stop listening. This is good.

Johnson and Johnson is facing two multi-billion dollar threats from court cases. Take them one at a time. First one comes from tens of thousands of women who use J&J baby powder and say they got cancer because there was asbestos in the talc.

Now, J&J denies there was sending asbestos in the talc. Now, J&J denies there was

sending asbestos in the talc, but that hasn't stopped juries from finding against the company

sometimes multi-billion dollar cases that, and it's using something called a Texas Two-Step

to try and deal with it. We're going to talk about that later. Hold that in your mind.

But also, J&J manufactured opioids. And so it's got all of these lawsuits from cities and states trying to recoup the costs they incurred as the opioid epidemic swept across America.

Now, in both of these cases, what J&J wants to do is just negotiate a big deal. It wants to be able to write

two big checks. In order to be able to do that, it's going to have to find judges who will

granted to stay from any future lawsuits. That's something that Elizabeth Warren, for one,

wants to make illegal. After the break, I'm going to talk to David Warfield. He's a bankruptcy lawyer at

Thompson-Coburn. He's going to explain what's at stake here, both for J&J and for the entire

bankruptcy bar. David, thank you so much for being here with us. Let's talk about Johnson

and Johnson, which is in the middle of two different,

massive tort fights, I guess you would call it. One of them is about opioids. Johnson and Johnson

had their own opioid. It was called Jurichesic. Bring us up to speed on how they're trying

to deal with this threat of having to pay out billions of dollars for

malfeasance in the world of opioids?

In the opioid cases, most of those lawsuits have been brought actually by state governments

or local governments, claiming that the defendants engaged in a public nuisance, and therefore

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