No idea if they're completely unique but the legal circumstances here appear to me to be at least unusual so this certainly isnt a common company bankruptcy story: shareholders agreed to pay money into the bankruptcy estate of the companies in return for a release of related, but separate, litigation claims from third parties against them.
From my reading, trading money into a bankruptcy pot in exchange for personal liability protection didn't seem that unusual and is apparently commonplace nowadays.
Whether it should be or not... probably not. But then we'd need much tougher laws to compel compliance with personal judgements as a consequence of bankruptcy proceedings (e.g. revoking citizenship, foreign country cooperation, etc).
If we removed the possibility for liability protection as part of a deal, shareholders would have less incentive to cooperate financially, and so there'd need to be a bigger enforcement stick to balance the equation.
I guess there's a spectrum - at one end are consensual settlements, in the middle somewhere are non-consensual settlements of claims where party A is suing party B because party B did something to reduce the value of party A's claim in the bankruptcy estate, and at the most controversial end (like this case) are non-consensual settlements of cases where party A sues both the bankrupt company and party B over something they both did.
The fact that this got overturned on initial appeal and then the original agreement reinstated on further appeal does suggest that it's at least legally controversial.
The arguments made by the court seem reasonable enough (that this may be the best chance for those suing the Sacklers to get any money out of them given the jurisdiction and counterclaim issues, and that the litigation would likely be expensive and time-consuming if it were to proceed) but I suppose it will strike many as odd that a bankruptcy court gets to make that judgment (and without actually hearing the cases themselves).
