We’ve posted before – here, here, and here – about the constitutionality issues (among many other problems) that we think are inherent whenever governmental units hire, without legislative approval, private outside contingent fee counsel to sue people (especially our clients) for money damages. Indeed, the issue is pending right now in the Supreme
As Product Liability Law360 (subscription required), Bloomberg News , AmLaw, and several plaintiff blogs have already mentioned, AstraZeneca scored big yesterday in the Seroquel litigation. Bloomberg reports that “AstraZeneca faces about 9000 lawsuits with more than 15,000 plaintiffs in the U.S. over claims that Seroquel causes diabetes.” The news is that yesterday Chief Judge
We enjoyed John Beisner and Jessica Miller’s paper, “Litigate the Torts, Not the Mass: A Modest Proposal for Reforming How Mass Torts are Adjudicated,” just published by the Washington Legal Foundation. (We liked Richard Nagareda’s foreword to the monograph, too. And we’re pleased to see that the authors are giving a talk based on their
This guest post was written by J.C. McElveen, of Jones Day. We thank him for the contribution:
In the late 1980s, members of the Havasupai tribe, an Indian tribe that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, approached an Arizona State University anthropologist with whom the tribe had been working for several decades
We’re collecting here various thoughts for voir dire questions in drug or device product liability cases that we’ve stumbled across recently. Some of the questions are new and interesting; some are tried and true; all are worth considering before you pick your next jury.
First:
“Has your confidence in the FDA increased, decreased, or stayed
As we reported yesterday, the California Supreme Court denied the petitions for review in Wyeth v. Conte. We’ve posted extensively on why we think Conte is a particularly dangerous expansion of tort liability because it simply ignores what product liability has been about for 50 years – that responsibility for product-related injuries follows
In Conte v. Wyeth, a California appellate court held that the manufacturer of a brand name drug could potentially be held liable for an injury allegedly caused by the generic version of the drug.
Our earlier rant about that case was here.
Today, the California Supreme Court refused to review the appellate court decision.
One of your humble scribes — Herrmann — has teamed up with two co-authors to publish
“Making Class Actions Work: The Untapped Potential of the Internet,” 69 U. Pitt. L. Rev. 727 (2008), which is just hitting newsstands today.
In the article, Herrmann, his colleague Brad Harrison, and his former colleague (and now Dean
We’re pleased to see that Russell Jackson, of Skadden, has launched a new blog about consumer class actions and mass torts.
Russell’s columns in the National Law Journal have always been insightful, and we look forward to reading his new ideas on-line.
Welcome to the blogosphere, Russell!
In case you missed it, we’re providing this link to Adam Liptak’s article in today’s New York Times: “How Much Should Judges Make?”
Apparently, a couple of empirical studies suggest that judicial pay is unrelated to “the quantity and quality of the work judges produce.”
We’ll just stand aside and watch the