New Delhi, July 28 -- NEW YORK - For more than a decade, the tens of thousands of women who sued Johnson & Johnson over its baby powder watched the company deploy every legal mechanism available to avoid full accountability. A subsidiary bankruptcy, designed specifically to channel liabilities through a shielded entity. Repeated appeals challenging both the science and the plaintiffs' legal standing. Settlement proposals that plaintiffs' attorneys consistently rejected as inadequate to the harm.

On Monday, that decade ended. Johnson & Johnson announced a $5.5 billion settlement resolving thousands of talc-related cancer lawsuits - the company's largest product liability resolution in its history - in which plaintiffs claimed the talc in ...