12. In LEXECON INC. v. MILBERG WEISS BERSHAD HYNES & LERACH, 523 U.S.

26, 118 S. Ct. 956, 140 L.Ed.2d 62 (1998), the Supreme Court held that 28 U.S.C. §

1407 imposes a duty on the Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to remand a transferred action to its original court for trial, and that the statute also bars a transferee court from entertaining a motion under 28 U.S.C. § 1404

(a) to order transfer of the case to itself once pretrial proceedings have ended. In so holding, the Court rejected a thirty-year practice382of self-assignment by the district courts that the Panel had sanctioned through its rulemaking authority. The Court declined to answer whether Section 1404(a)“permits self-transfer” by the transferee court “given that the statute explicitly provides for transfer only ‘to any other district.’ ” Id. at 41 n. 4, 118 S.Ct. at 964 n.4, 140 L.Ed.2d at 76 n.4. Does Lexecon preclude the transferor court, after remand, from transferring the case back to the Section 1407 transferee court under 28 U.S.C. § 1404? The Judicial Conference of the United States has requested that the mandatory remand provision be eliminated from 28 U.S.C. § 1407, but Congress has not yet adopted an amendment to this effect.

See Marcus, Cure-All For an Era of Dispersed Litigation? Toward a Maximalist Use of the Multidistrict Litigation Panel’s Transfer Power, 82 Tul. L. Rev. 2245 (2008). In the meantime, because the procedure for multidistrict transfer is a rule of venue, some circuits have held that the parties may waive the statutory provision for mandatory remand. See Armstrong v.

LaSalle Bank Nat. Ass’n., 552 F.3d 613 (7th Cir. 2009).