According to the Wikipedia entry (OK, maybe not the most reliable source, but it is the fastest), “American exceptionalism” is the notion “that the United States is qualitatively different from other nations.” The first person to say so (although not in those exact words) wasn’t even American, but French – Alexis de Tocqueville. While sometimes
Since we haven’t heard any of the services mention it, we thought we’d point out that the learned intermediary rule recently got a lengthy endorsement in prescription medical product cases from the Tennessee Supreme Court:
[T]he learned intermediary doctrine. . ., which allows a seller in a failure to warn case to rely on an
Several years ago (just writing that makes us feel tired) we put up a mournful post entitled In The Deserts Of New Mexico, in which we expressed our disappointment that a federal judge – any federal judge – would ignore no fewer than four intermediate appellate decisions from the New Mexico Court of Appeals and
In the last two Supreme Court cases we have been following this term, the Court took a critical look at the stream of commerce basis for personal jurisdiction and, as we hoped (and expected), ruled in defendants favor in both. We discussed both lower court decisions in our prior post Personal Jurisdiction—A Primer which criticizes
When we began practicing law, we worked for a partner who believed in scorched-earth research. Every time we’d go to his office with our findings, he’d begin by asking what we had looked at: “Did you look at X? Did you look at Y? Did you look at Z?” As soon as we admitted we
The Supreme Court decided the climate change case, American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, No. 10–174, slip op. (U.S. June 20, 2011), and the class action case, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, No. 10–277, slip op. (U.S. June 20, 2011), yesterday. We can’t hope to compete with the deluge of general comment on
It’s hard to draft the Monday post without being unduly influenced by the weekend’s bloviations and dissipations. Between the WSJ weekend review section, the NYT Week in Review, the television parade of talking heads, and the requisite pitcher of mojitos on the deck, at least one random and silly Big Thought is certain to weasel