Philadelphia City Hall in Downtown Philadelphia, home to the Court of Common Pleas
PHILADELPHIA – A Philadelphia judge will not step down from hundreds of lawsuits alleging Zantac causes cancer, rejecting doubts of his impartiality stemming from his wife’s job.
Judge Joshua Roberts this week turned down the request of plaintiffs firm Keller Postman, which argues his wife’s position at the firm Blank Rome complicates cases alleging the ranitidine in the heartburn medicine morphs into cancer-causing NDMA in the human stomach.
Those claims are based on what other judges have found to be unacceptable science. Blank Rome represents Apotex in the Zantac litigation and brought in Roberts’ wife Shannon McClure as a partner in February 2025.
That company faces only one lawsuit in Philadelphia out of the more than 500 filed there. When a colleague testified on the recusal issue, he said he “can represent that her compensation has no direct relationship” to fees earned from Apotex.
Roberts said in a short order Wednesday that Keller Postman waited eight months after he disclosed his wife’s new job and that there is no merit to its argument.
“I can manage the Zantac mass tort in an impartial manner free of personal bias or interest in the outcome,” Roberts wrote.
“Management of the program ranges from case management, ruling on procedural motions, ruling on substantive motions, and positioning bellwether cases for trial. Through this process, I work with court-appointed liaison counsel (Blank Rome is not liaison counsel).
“It is exceptionally rare that individual cases are discussed until the bellwether selection process, and I do not preside over the actual trials.”
Roberts has been celebrated by the American Tort Reform Association for keeping other lawyers from presenting certain evidence in Philadelphia’s Roundup program. Those cases claim the weedkiller causes cancer and are based on a 2015 International Agency for Research on Cancer study.
What evidence Roberts allows in the Zantac litigation will be key. Lawsuits are based on testing by the laboratory Valisure LLC, and its methods have been rejected by the FDA.
The litigation against GlaxoSmithKline and others began when Valisure created headlines in 2019 by claiming its testing showed Zantac and its generic equivalents contained ranitidine that changed to NDMA once ingested. Lawyers began spending on advertising for clients and cited the study in ensuing litigation, calling Valisure an "independent" lab.
Valisure had brought its findings in a citizen petition to the FDA, which ordered a short-lived recall. The FDA later said Valisure's methods were unreliable, saying the lab's "artificial stomach" was heated to 260 degrees and subjected to lethal levels of salt to create NDMA from Zantac.
Valisure detected no NDMA in the drug when testing it under normal human conditions. That didn't stop lawyers who, after a Florida ruling tossing their experts, moved on to courts in Delaware, California, Philadelphia and elsewhere.
In December, a Delaware judge seemingly doomed 75,000 cases when he refused to let Keller Postman and other firms back them up with new expert testimony. The state Supreme Court had found the opinions of their previous experts unreliable.
In Philadelphia, Keller Postman says it has noticed a whiff of a “personal displeasure” with calls for an evidentiary hearing on whether Roberts should recuse himself.
“By suggesting that an evidentiary hearing would be appropriate, you would be seeking to impugn my credibility to me, because I’m the one who’s deciding the motion,” Roberts said at a November status conference.
“There is no ability for a party to conduct an evidentiary hearing in support of a motion to recuse,” he added, plus, “The decision is mine. The decision is mine and only mine. There’s no other evidence. You can’t cross-examine me.”