Judicial Panel Sends Drywall Antitrust Actions to Philadelphia Federal Court

WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judicial panel has chosen Philadelphia as the location for a multidistrict litigation docket of about a dozen class actions filed against domestic drywall manufacturers that allegedly conspired to fix prices when their products were in high demand.

The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation ruled April 8 that all 14 pending federal antitrust cases shared common fact issues that make them appropriate for centralization in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The lawsuits allege that domestic drywall producers violated federal antitrust laws when they fixed and maintained artificially high prices for their …