August 2021

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Back in May, we discussed the latest amendments proposed by the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to Fed. R. Evid. 702.  These amendments, while not changing the substance of Rule 702’s standards for admission of expert testimony – helpfulness, factual basis, reliability – are intended to reinforce other aspects of the Rule.  These

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We reported two weeks ago on the poorly conceived and ill-fated attempt by students to enjoin a public university from mandating COVID-19 vaccines.  There simply is no fundamental right under the Constitution to refuse vaccination, which has been firmly established for more than 100 years.  Now the Seventh Circuit has agreed.

Let’s be candid about

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To find bloggable cases, we (well, Bexis) read a lot of cases that don’t turn out to be sufficiently significant to be bloggable.  Even those cases of lesser interest can alert us to trends, if the same issue or argument crops up repeatedly.  One of those is the TwIqbal concept of a “shotgun complaint” –

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This is actually Rachel Weil’s post, but she is having password problems, so Bexis is doing the actual posting

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We spent last weekend in a shore house with extended family members (all vaccinated, of course) gathered to celebrate a cousin’s milestone birthday.  Since we had last gathered, babies had been born, the family matriarch

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Back in the early days of the blog, when it was a Bexis/Herrmann operation, we wrote about the California Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to all that food litigation that now plagues that state − Farm Raised Salmon Cases, 175 P.3d 1170 (Cal. 2008).  We explained how the court In Farm Raised

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We are in the midst of a multidistrict litigation in which the claims are even more frail than usual, the quality of the ‘inventory’ is even junkier than usual, and the pace of discovery regarding individual cases is even slower than usual. Nevertheless, the plaintiff lawyers (joined, sadly, by the court) frequently express exasperation with