This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
Search for Medtronic on this blog and you’re going to find preemption cases. Lots of preemption cases. Mostly preemption victories for the defense. An overwhelming body of preemption law has been made by Medtronic. They’ve certainly led the charge. So, if we say today’s
We previously addressed the in pari delicto doctrine, whereby a plaintiff injured in the course of his or her criminal conduct cannot recover for those injuries. We specifically examined this doctrine’s most common application in prescription medical product liability litigation – where the plaintiff is injured as a consequence of his or her illegal use
Normally, when we think of decisions relating to medical monitoring, the issue is whether a state will recognize medical monitoring for uninjured people as a separate claim or relief that can be sought under an existing theory of recovery. Just last month, we noted that it looked like the issue had been largely resolved
A couple of weeks ago, our co-blogger, Mr. McConnell, published a post on the benefits of brevity. That post sprang from an argument before the JPML, but we can riff on it today as we examine a short and lovely decision from the Northern District of New York. We have all suffered through opinions in
Last week we were going through the regulatory record of a drug that is now the subject of mass tort litigation. This effort is central to assembling, per the SCOTUS Wyeth v. Levine case, “clear evidence” that the FDA would not have approved whatever label change the plaintiffs are advocating. Then we remembered something. It
Last week appears to have been a bit of a slow week in the drug and device litigation arena. It was after all a short work week. It was back to school week (at least in the North East), which while bringing delight to parents everywhere also brings the chaos of last minute school supply
We’ve never liked the “cy pres” concept in the context of class actions. We opposed it (not terribly successfully) when the ALI was considering it. We believe that taking money supposedly representing “damages” owed to class members and giving it to strangers is inherently substantive and thus not allowed by Fed. R. Civ. P.
“I am from Missouri. You have got to show me.” That quote attributed to Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver in 1899 is reputedly the source of Missouri’s unofficial nickname, the “Show Me” state. Or maybe it isn’t. Whatever the slogan’s origin, a federal judge in Missouri recently said “show me” when 83 plaintiffs from 30
We’ve made no secret of our dislike of the so called “heeding presumption.” We have a tag on this subject with multiple posts decrying this presumption — that juries may presume that if an alternative adequate warning had been given, it would have been heeded by the plaintiff (or, in prescription medical product cases, the
Back in 2010 we started titling some of our posts “There’ll Always Be Posner,” in mimicry of the “There’ll Always Be an England” squibs in The New Yorker. Just as there is something uniquely charming, majestic and, occasionally, flat-out weird about news from the quirky island that formerly ruled over us, there