40
Opinion of the Court
"The proposed statute affects only the pretrial stages in multidistrict litigation. It would not affect the place of trial in any case or exclude the possibility of transfer under other Federal statutes.
. . . . . "The subsection requires that transferred cases be remanded to the originating district at the close of coordinated pretrial proceedings. The bill does not, therefore, include the trial of cases in the consolidated proceedings." H. R. Rep., at 3-4.
The comments of the bill's sponsors further suggest that application of § 1407 (before the addition of subsection (h)) would not affect the place of trial. See, e. g., Multidistrict Litigation: Hearings on S. 3815 and S. 159 before the Subcommittee on Improvements in Judicial Machinery of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., pt. 2, p. 110 (1967) (Sen. Tydings) ("[W]hen the deposition and discovery is completed, then the original litigation is remanded to the transferor district for the trial"). Both the House and the Senate Reports stated that Congress would have to amend the statute if it determined that multidistrict litigation cases should be consolidated for trial. S. Rep. No. 454, 90th Cong., 1st Sess., p. 5 (1967).
D
In sum, none of the arguments raised can unsettle the straightforward language imposing the Panel's responsibility to remand, which bars recognizing any self-assignment power in a transferee court and consequently entails the invalidity of the Panel's Rule 14(b). See 28 U. S. C. § 1407(f). Milberg may or may not be correct that permitting transferee courts to make self-assignments would be more desirable than preserving a plaintiff's choice of venue (to the degree that § 1407(a) does so), but the proper venue for resolving that issue remains the floor of Congress. See Am-
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