1. Do you agree with the court that the public interest is served best by settlement in these kinds of cases? Why or why not?

2. What is a fair sum to pay business owners who suffered damages through loss of tourism because of the spill? Isn’t it impossible to determine how much a particular business could have made?

After the Deepwater Horizon explosion and spill affected the health and economic well-being of Gulf Coast residents, hundreds of lawsuits were filed against BP. In August 2010, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized all federal actions in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana pursuant to federal statutes. Eventually, hundreds of cases with thousands of individual claimants would be consolidated with this Multidistrict Litigation. The parties engaged in an extraordinary amount of discovery within a compressed time period to prepare for trial. The court ordered a Fairness Hearing in order to determine approvability of the negotiated Settlement Agreement. Some plaintiffs argued that it was not fair that BP would obtain a broad class-wide release as well as a signed Individual Release from each claimant that accepts a payment pursuant to the Settlement Agreement.