Science affects law, but law also affects science. As litigators, we often think about the former; we less often think about the latter.
A recent article in Neurology journal, written by two physicians and two lawyers, bemoans “The impact of litigation on neurologic research.” The article discusses a couple of cases in which litigants have
Over ten years ago, Lars Noah (now on the faculty of the University of Florida College of Law) wrote on the subject of product warnings. In his article, he noted that it was theoretically possible for a plaintiff to sue a defendant not just for failing to warn, but for the opposite — for over-warning.
We understand why lawyers sometimes exasperate the MDL Panel. When plaintiffs’ counsel are advocating that cases be centralized before Judge A, counsel may suggest that Judge B has an unfair defense orientation. Defense counsel then argue the reverse: the cases should in fact be centralized before the wise and sagacious Judge B, because it is
Four years ago, when one of the cohosts of this blog was slogging away on the first edition of Statewide Coordinated Proceedings: State Court Analogues to the Federal MDL Process (Thomson-West 2d rev. ed. 2004), we would have given anything for a resource that gathered information about how the fifty states handled mass torts. We
All eyes in the drug preemption world are, of course, on Colacicco v. Apotex, now on appeal in the Third Circuit. The later appeal from McNellis v. Pfizer (out of the District of New Jersey) has now been consolidated with Colacicco. Colacicco has been stayed until briefing is completed in McNellis. The
The “Great Divide” in medical device preemption law is well known and reasonably well established – pending possible United States Supreme Court review (in the pending certiorari petition from Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 451 F.3d 104 (2d Cir. 2006), the high court recently requested a brief from the FDA). In all circuits save one,
Judge Posner’s recent opinion in In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation, Nos. 05-3265, 05-3266, 05-3305 (7th Cir. Dec. 13, 2006), attracted some attention because the Seventh Circuit reversed in part the dismissal of the slavery reparations class actions. But on this blog, when we post on a slavery reparations decision, we aim straight for
Scientific experts of course require that statistical significance be established at a p-value of .05, which is a 95 percent confidence interval. The 95 percent confidence interval is completely unrelated to the burden of proof in a civil case — the “preponderance of the evidence.”
We nonetheless frequently hear plaintiffs maintain that “the burden of