August 2009

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Imagine this: The only published article in the medical literature reaching a statistically significant result concerning a drug and an outcome turns out not to have been what it seems. Rather, over a third of the subjects in the relevant category turn out to be misclassified. When properly reclassified, the statistical significance between the drug

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Earlier this week, we posted about how the MDL court in the Nuvaring litigation denied outright a defense motion to dismiss on the entirely procedural ground that the master complaint was an “administrative tool” and not intended for motion practice under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12. In re Nuvaring Products Liability Litigation, 2009 WL

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Oy! Don’t bother!

We’re scouring the web for stuff in the scholarly literature that might interest practitioners in our field, and we’re coming up awfully close to empty.

We’re posting below portions of the abstracts — do we save you time, or what? — of the most interesting three recent articles we found. And you

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We just saw this morning that folks at Princeton, Harvard, and the Internet Archive have created and released a new computer program that hacks PACER, the system for retrieving federal court opinions.

Apparently, this new program has a database with many opinions pre-loaded into it, and others will be added as folks download more decisions

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Suppose you have a product liability MDL.
Individual lawsuits are arriving by the mailbagful.
You need a system to sort out which claims can proceed and which should be dismissed as a matter of law. What’s a judge to do?
On the one hand, you could order defendants to file motions to dismiss each of

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One of us (Bexis) was updating a book chapter on “What Litigators Need to Know About the FDA,” and wanted to cite to the CDER (Center for Drug Evaluation and Research) Handbook concerning its definition of “untitled letter.” But the link to the CDER Handbook wasn’t active on the FDA’s website. Well, that prompted an