formed the overwhelming bulk" of American product liability lawsuits. It was "the unintended application of [Section] 402A to the design context" which resulted in the explosion of mass tort product liability cases during the 1980s throughout the United States. In the federal judicial system, the number of product liability civil actions filed per year increased from 2,393 in 1975 to 13,408 in 1989, and product liability's percentage of all federal civil cases increased from 2.0% to 5.7% during the same period. These numbers reflect only a small portion of the 1980s explosion in product liability cases; the vast majority of American lawsuits are heard in state courts and not federal courts. In subsequent decades, American federal judges began to heavily rely upon the multidistrict litigation (MDL) statute () to manage an ever-increasing number of complex civil cases. For the first time, by the end of 2018 more than half (51.9%) of all pending American federal civil cases had been centralized into MDLs, with 156,511 cases in 248 MDLs out of a total of 301,766 civil cases. Product liability was the dominant category both in terms of percentage of total active MDLs (32.9%) and percentage of total civil cases centralized into MDLs (91%). Among the factors which led to the large numbers of product liability cases seen today in the United States are relatively low fees for filing lawsuits, the availability of class actions, the strongest right to a jury trial in the world, the highest awards of monetary damages in the world (frequently in the millions of dollars for pain and suffering noneconomic damages and in rare cases soaring into the billions for punitive damages), and the most extensive right to discovery in the world. No other country has adopted the U.S. standard of disclosure of information that is "reasonably calculated to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence." American reported cases are replete with plaintiffs whose counsel artfully exploited this standard to obtain so-called "smoking gun" evidence of product defects and made defendants pay "a tremendous price" for their callous disregard for product safety. Tort reform and the neo-conservative reaction In response to these developments, a tort reform movement appeared in the 1980s which persuaded many state legislatures to enact various limitations like damage caps and statutes of repose. However, the majority of states left untouched the basic rule of strict liability for defective products, and all efforts at