How many of us entered law school dreaming of following the paths of Brandeis, Marshall, etc. in the field of constitutional law? How many of us now can go weeks, or even months, without reading a Supreme Court case? Paying off student loans led many of us to work for law firms where there was far less available to do in constitutional law than in, say, commercial disputes, securities, or product liability law. But we’re not mooning over the path not taken. Somewhere in that perineum between law school graduation and partnership, we learned that while constitutional law gets the headlines, it can also be in some ways, a less satisfying practice area. We don’t merely mean that it doesn’t pay as much, at least not reliably. The problem with constitutional law is that it turns too much on the predilections of a few judges, and turns too little on rules and realities. Statutory interpretation or antitrust analysis or a Daubert dispute demand rigor. Perhaps there is rigor in unwinding the doctrinal wanderings of First or Fourth Amendment law (and their “penumbras”), too, but politics and prejudice seem to take positions at the head of the line in those flashy areas. (There is currently an abortion case before the Supreme Court that asks whether a precedent set way, way back in 2016 should be overturned. Question: what has changed? Answer: politics and the makeup of the nine solons who get to tell us what the constitution means.).
Every once in a while, constitutional law intersects with other legal battlegrounds in interesting ways. Our blog, for example, has had multiple occasions to discuss the tension between the First Amendment and regulatory/judicial restraints on drug and device marketing. Now comes a brilliant, nervy law review article that examines this issue and makes some exciting proposals. The article is by Florida law professor Lars Noah, it appears in the Fall 2019 edition (volume 92) of the Temple Law Review, and is entitled, “Does the U.S. Constitution Constrain State Products Liability Doctrine?” The article is insightful and blessedly brief, so you should check it out yourself. We won’t step on too many of the article’s points, but here is a preview that we hope will inspire you to take a look at the article before you draft your next summary judgment brief.
Professor Noah begins by focusing on the dreadful decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court in the Perez case holding that the learned intermediary doctrine, which limits the duty to warn when selling prescription drugs and devices, did not apply whenever manufacturers had engaged in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. The article boldly suggests that the rule announced in Perez might run afoul of the Constitution. After all, in cases such as Virginia State Board of Pharmacy and Thompson v. Western States Medical Center, the Supreme Court has applied the first amendment to limit government efforts to bar truthful and nondeceptive pharmaceutical advertising.
(The article reminds us that Perez involved a contraceptive. The New Jersey court apparently believed that the product “did not qualify as a therapeutically important product,” and seemed willing to carve out another exception to the learned intermediary doctrine for “lifestyle” drug and devices, whether or not directly advertised to consumers.)
Professor Noah points out that the DTC exception in Perez “plainly singles out for unfavorable treatment defendants that engage in commercial speech simply because some of the judges in that state have no use for the practice.” That sounds like content-related discrimination (both speaker- and topic-based) against certain speech.
The article does not confine itself to the Perez issue. It explores whether constitutional protection should extend to the marketing of certain products that implicate certain rights. Contraceptives – such as the product at issue in Perez – would be among those products, something we’ve noted here on the Blog. An analogy is drawn to the First Amendment’s requirement of tolerating some defamatory falsehoods in order to avoid chilling valuable speech. Why shouldn’t other fundamental rights (think of some of the most controversial SCOTUS opinions, such as Griswold, Roe, and Heller) require tolerating the “sale of certain arguably defective products lest suppliers become spooked about distributing even nondefective versions that individuals have a right to use“?
That is not an absolute principal; there aren’t that many absolutes in constitutional law. Professor Noah proposes that “Constitutional regard for ensuring the availability of certain products would not entirely insulate sellers, just as authors and publishers remain subject to defamation lawsuits, but it would necessitate imposing a higher pleading standard on plaintiffs. In order to really safeguard constitutionally valuable products, even allegations of negligence would not suffice, instead, courts should have to recognize a regulatory compliance defense.”
The article concludes that “[t]he time may have come to extend the U.S. Supreme Court’s drive to constitutionalize the domain of speech torts into the field of products liability.” That notion is intriguing not only because of its potential scope and consequences, but also because it is grounded in precedent and logic. At a minimum, we should ponder possible constitutional dimensions before we put the finishing touches on our dispositive motions.