Cite as: 523 U. S. 26 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
"Each action so transferred shall be remanded by the panel at or before the conclusion of such pretrial proceedings to the district from which it was transferred unless it shall have been previously terminated." § 1407(a) (proviso without application here omitted).
The Panel's instruction comes in terms of the mandatory "shall," which normally creates an obligation impervious to judicial discretion. Anderson v. Yungkau, 329 U. S. 482, 485 (1947). In the absence of any indication that there might be circumstances in which a transferred case would be neither "terminated" nor subject to the remand obligation, then, the statutory instruction stands flatly at odds with reading the phrase "coordinated or consolidated pretrial proceedings" so broadly as to reach its literal limits, allowing a transferee court's self-assignment to trump the provision imposing the Panel's remand duty. If we do our job of reading the statute whole, we have to give effect to this plain command, see Estate of Cowart v. Nicklos Drilling Co., 505 U. S. 469, 476 (1992), even if doing that will reverse the longstanding practice under the statute and the rule, see Metropolitan Stevedore Co. v. Rambo, 515 U. S. 291, 300 (1995) (" 'Age is no antidote to clear inconsistency with a statute' " (quoting Brown v. Gardner, 513 U. S. 115, 122 (1994))).
As the Ninth Circuit panel majority saw it, however, the inconsistency between an expansive view of "coordinated or consolidated pretrial" proceedings and the uncompromising terms of the Panel's remand obligation disappeared as merely an apparent conflict, not a real one. The "focus" of § 1407 was said to be constituting the Panel and defining its authority, not circumscribing the powers of district courts under § 1404(a). 102 F. 3d, at 1533. Milberg presses this point in observing that § 1407(a) does not, indeed, even apply to transferee courts, being concerned solely with the Panel's duties, whereas § 1407(b), addressed to the transferee courts, says nothing about the Panel's obligation to remand. But this analysis fails to persuade, for the very reason that it
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