Don’t be deceived by the date of this post! We update this scorecard regularly!
Folks keep asking us for the drug preemption scorecard: Since the FDA promulgated its “Preemption Preamble” in January 2006, how many decisions have accepted the preemption defense, and how many have courts rejected it?
It’s not quite that easy. There are
Riegel Motions
We’ve had a couple of inquiries since our last post on Riegel went up asking for the papers filed concerning the belated disclosure of the plaintiff’s death. We like to think of ourselves as a full-service blog, so here they are. The first thing filed was plaintiff’s suggestion of death and motion for substitution. The
Whither Riegel?
We’ve heard through the grapevine (well because one of us has tangential involvement) that the Riegel v. Medtronic case, that the Supreme Court took to sort out the question of preemption and pre-market approved medical devices, may not get decided after all.
There’s been a flurry of recent motion practice due to the death of
Getting the Judge to Notice the FDA
Today we’re thinking about evidence – specifically FDA evidence. There’s a lot of different kinds. There are FDA approval letters, something we usually want to get in. There are FDA warning letters, Something that we always want to keep out. The same can be said for adverse drug and medical device reports, which we’ve already
Flipping Through The Times (Popular Press and Litigation)
We were flipping through The New York Times on Sunday, and two articles caught our eye.
Don’t worry; we won’t burden you with our view of the Iraq war.
The cover story of the Magazine is titled “Unhealthy Science: Why can’t we trust much of what we hear about diet, health and behavior-related diseases?” We
A Plaintiff-Side Thought (Liability for Costs)
As readers of this blog know, we root for the defense here.
We really have no choice. Since we represent drug and device companies in product liability cases for a living, we can’t publicly say things that could later be used against us (or our clients, or our colleagues). So we might occasionally have a
Consumer Class Actions Hit New Jersey Barrier
Last week the New Jersey Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision (6-0) ordered a nationwide third-party payer class action decertified. See International Union of Operating Engineers Local No. 68 Welfare Fund v. Merck & Co., 2007 WL 2493917 (N.J. Sep. 6, 2007). There have already been a number of blog posts discussing this case,
Colacicco Oral Argument Scheduled
In letters sent to the parties in both Colacicco and McNellis, the Third Circuit has tentatively scheduled both cases (they aren’t technically consolidated) for “consideration” on December 10, 2007. Technically that is not a date for oral argument (yet) since the court does not decide whether there will be oral argument until about ten
Man Bites Dog (Depo-Provera MDL Ruling)
We’ve previously posted about the MDL Panel’s increasing propensity to grant motions to coordinate product liability cases.
That’s why we were pleased to see the Panel’s order last month denying plaintiffs’ motion to coordinate the Depo-Provera cases.
Maybe Pfizer was shooting fish in a barrel. The Panel considered the need to coordinate only three federal
Yet Another Disappointment (Legal Scholarship)
We’re proud of the anti-intellectual, luddite image that we project through our blog. (We figure: If you’ve got it, flaunt it.)
But the truth is, we’re pretty curious guys. We’ve each written books and law review articles, and we regularly read an awful lot of stuff – not just in the course of client representations,