Corporate money has a powerful and malign influence on so many aspects of American life. But even by that low standard, events this week in a New York bankruptcy court are shocking. The legal system has effectively allowed one of the country’s richest families to buy its way out of accountability for what a White House commission called “America’s national nightmare” of mass opioid addiction.

On Wednesday, the court approved a deal for the dissolution of the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma, which kicked off the opioid epidemic two decades ago with its illegal drive to sell a high-strength painkiller, OxyContin. Purdue’s owners, members of two branches of the now-notorious Sackler family, are estimated to have made more than $10bn from the drug – even as the opioid crisis claimed more than 600,000 lives, with the toll climbing higher by the year.

Astonishingly, the Sacklers seem to have been able to work the bankruptcy process to buy themselves immunity from accountability in the civil courts – in return for handing over only a small fraction […]