Once a mass tort becomes widely publicized, sometimes based on a combination of a bad study, a verdict or two for plaintiffs, internet sites, and late night television ads, lots of plaintiffs come out of the woodwork, including plaintiffs with weak, late, or marginal claims. Those plaintiffs and the clever lawyers who assist them believe
An Earful on Rule 702
We often encounter cases where the lawyers or judges do things that are mysterious, disappointing, or just plain crazy. And the temptation is there to poke fun or criticize. But the nuns taught us long ago that it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness. So we try to insert something constructive in
Putting Things To Better Use
The First Amendment
We read the other day about how the First Amendment helped a tiny church worshipping an even smaller god escape a mega tort verdict for intentional infliction of emotional distress caused by it’s picketing of military funerals. Regardless of the questionable merit of the Westboro Baptist Church’s activities, its legal win –
Where To Find Our Research
We’ve been blogging now for more than four years. Our first substantive posts went up on November 15, 2006, and by now more than 1450 have followed those.
Frankly, even for us, it’s getting hard to find stuff. And since we actually wrote all these blasted posts, and presumably remember at least some of what’s
Ninth Circuit Tells Organic Farmers To Beet It
Apologies for the groan-worthy pun in the title, but what did you expect in a case involving sugar beets? Sugar beets, in case you don’t know (we didn’t), are responsible for 44% of the domestic refined sugar supply. In the past few years, Monsanto and others have developed genetically engineered sugar beets that can tolerate
Something For Non-U.S. Defendants To Consider
We’re the Drug and Device Law Blog here, but when we look at court opinions, sometimes we can’t tell if they’re in our bailiwick or not, until we read them. So it was with Infuturia Global Ltd. v. Sequus Pharmaceuticals, Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2011 WL 353214 (9th Cir. Feb. 7, 2011). The defendant had the word “pharmaceuticals” in its name, and that was enough to get us to take a peek.
Sadly, Infuturia was a patent case.
Happily, it wasn’t about patents, but rather about procedure. As lawyers, we’re always interested in the latest procedural twist.
Even better, Infuturia was about removal to federal court – a perennial favorite of ours. And it’s not just any kind of removal, either, but removal that doesn’t require diversity of citizenship (that is, that the defendants and plaintiffs don’t have to be from different states, or countries).
With all the hellhole jurisdictions out there, we’re all ears when something – anything – suggests a way that out clients can get out of dodge regardless of the other side’s attempts to join marginal in-state defendants, or otherwise manipulate the prerequisites to diversity jurisdiction.
Infuturia has the potential to help defendants located in other countries, when (as is usual) they’re included in a scattershot complaint with various U.S. distributors, subsidiaries, etc.
Infuturia dealt with a rather obscure aspect (at least it was to us) of the Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards. What’s that, you ask? Well, a lot of companies outside the U.S. would rather arbitrate disputes than litigate them. In Infuturia, the dispute was about the licensing of what sounds like a form of nanotechnology (liposomes – little hollow balls of fat – used to deliver drugs into the body) amongst mostly non-U.S. companies.
For our purposes, the most important player is a third party – an Israeli corporation – that had previously been sued by the plaintiff plaintiff (Infutura, a B.V.I. company) and lost in international arbitration. That’s probably why the plaintiff didn’t sue it again.
But the plaintiff sued others who had worked with this non-party arbitration winner.Continue Reading Something For Non-U.S. Defendants To Consider