Every sport has that one venue where the home team gets every close call.  Fenway in the late 2010s. Lambeau Field in a January snowstorm. Or, if you are a Baltimore Orioles fan — Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, where a twelve-year-old kid with a glove reached over the fence, and an umpire who should have known better decided he had not seen what everyone else on the planet had just watched on the replay (yes, still bitter). And now, apparently, the Complex Litigation Docket in Waterbury, Connecticut, is the place for plaintiffs suing over Filshie Clips.

We have chronicled the Filshie Clip litigation extensively on this blog, and the pattern has been remarkably consistent — plaintiffs allege that the clips migrate more often than the 0.13% rate reported to the FDA, that the defendant should have reported more of those migrations as adverse events, and that better reporting would somehow have led to better warnings that would somehow have changed a physician’s or patient’s decision to use the product. And in courtroom after courtroom, from Texas to Georgia to Illinois to Florida to Kentucky, that theory has gone down swinging on preemption grounds. We have practically run out of ways to say “another win for the defense.”

Then the litigation came to Connecticut, and the string snapped. The case is In re 2024 Connecticut Filshie Clip Litigation, 2026 WL 2322193 (Conn. Super. Aug. 4, 2026). This is the consolidated proceeding for all Filshie Clip cases filed in 2024.  Defendant moved to strike the plaintiffs’ complaints in their entirety as preempted by the FDCA. The court split the baby. It struck the design defect claims, but let the failure-to-warn claims — which are really failure-to-report claims wearing a warnings costume — survive.

On the design defect side, the ruling is exactly what it should be. The Filshie Clip is a Class III device that went through PMA, so Riegel preemption applies with full force. The plaintiffs never alleged that the clip’s design deviated from what the FDA approved, and without that allegation, a design defect claim is nothing more than an attack on the FDA’s own safety and effectiveness determination. No surprises there, and no complaints from us.

The failure-to-warn ruling is where things go sideways, and it goes sideways for a reason we predicted years ago. Back in 2022, we wrote about the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision in Glover v. Bausch & Lomb, and we did not mince words about it then either. The Second Circuit had certified a question to the Connecticut Supreme Court asking whether the Connecticut Product Liability Act (“CPLA”) recognizes a cause of action based on a manufacturer’s failure to report adverse events to the FDA. The right answer, and the answer nearly every other state has given, was no. Connecticut said yes.

The theory, as we described it at the time, requires treating the FDA as a kind of substitute learned intermediary — as if federal regulators, rather than a treating physician, are “in the best position” to receive warnings and pass them along to patients. That is a strange fit for a state statute built around the traditional learned intermediary framework, and it opens exactly the door that Buckman was supposed to close — private plaintiffs using state tort law to enforce a manufacturer’s reporting obligations to a federal agency. It was a bad decision in 2022 and nothing about watching it play out in the Filshie Clip litigation has changed our minds.

In fairness, the current ruling is almost mechanical given that the Second Circuit had already blessed the outcome twice in the Glover trilogy — Glover I certifying the question, Glover II answering it, and Glover III applying the Connecticut Supreme Court’s answer to hold that the claims survived preemption. Once the In re 2024 Filshie Clip court had that binding roadmap sitting on the shelf, denying the motion to strike as to the failure-to-warn claims was less a judicial decision than a formality. The court dutifully found that the plaintiffs’ allegations fit within the same “narrow gap” Glover carved out — plaintiffs suing for conduct that happens to violate the FDCA, but not suing because it violates the FDCA. It is a distinction that sounds meaningful in the abstract and evaporates the moment you apply it to a complaint that is, from top to bottom, about underreporting adverse events to a federal regulator.

The court also brushed aside the mountain of contrary Filshie Clip authority from other jurisdictions because those states, unlike Connecticut, do not have a duty that “parallels” the federal reporting requirement. That is technically accurate, and it is exactly the problem. As we have noted repeatedly, and as our 50-state survey documents, the overwhelming majority of states do not recognize any tort duty to report adverse events to the FDA, which means failure-to-report theories in those states are preempted twice over. Expressly, because they seek to impose a requirement different from or in addition to federal law, and impliedly, because without a genuine parallel state duty, the claim is just private FDCA enforcement dressed up in state-law language. Connecticut is an outlier that manufactured its own parallel duty out of whole cloth, and now it is reaping exactly the litigation it invited.

There is a reason this result was entirely predictable rather than some bolt from the blue. The plaintiffs’ bar keeps running the identical playbook against this identical product. The Filshie Clip is a contraceptive device — titanium clips with a silicone lining, placed on the fallopian tubes for tubal ligation — and it has become one of the plaintiffs’ bar’s preferred vehicles for a broader campaign against reproductive choice. These cases are based on an inflated migration rate untethered to what the FDA actually requires to be reported. The FDA’s reporting obligations are triggered only by events that are potentially injurious; the overwhelming majority of clip migrations are asymptomatic and cause no injury at all. Plaintiffs’ lawyers know this, which is exactly why their complaints omit it. In other jurisdictions, that omission sometimes is enough to survive a motion to dismiss, but as the summary judgment records have shown, the theory falls apart once actual evidence is required.

What Glover does in Connecticut is worse. It does not just let artful drafting slip past a skeptical judge, it manufactures the underlying cause of action itself, so there is no field-of-dreams uncertainty about whether the claim exists at all once discovery starts. The tragedy is how much discovery expense a defendant has to absorb before any of these claims meet their inevitable end, and Connecticut made that expense a certainty rather than a probability.

In addition, the In re 2024 Filshie Clip opinion leaves two loose threads that matter quite a bit for what happens next. First, the court never tells us how many of the plaintiffs in this consolidated docket are actually Connecticut residents, or had their clips implanted in Connecticut, such that Connecticut law — and Glover’s idiosyncratic reporting duty — would even govern their claims. One of the Filshie Clip defendants happens to be headquartered in Connecticut, which invites the obvious question whether plaintiffs from elsewhere are trying to borrow Connecticut law simply because the defendant can be found there. Second, the opinion does not say how many plaintiffs are part of this litigation at all. Both numbers matter for a choice-of-law fight that could meaningfully shrink the practical reach of this ruling, and both are conspicuously absent from the decision.

So, is Waterbury actually the house that Jeffrey Maier built for the Filshie Clip plaintiffs’ bar, the one park where the umpire calls it a home run no matter what actually happened on the field? Not exactly. Design defect claims still struck out looking, and if the choice-of-law questions get asked (and they should be), the failure-to-warn survivors on this roster may turn out to be a much smaller team than the complaint suggests. Glover is the twelve-year-old fan reaching over the wall — it does not change what the ball actually did, it just changes what the umpire is willing to call. But make no mistake, as long as Glover remains good law, Connecticut will keep ruling that pitch a home run when every other park in the country would call it exactly what it is. We told you back in 2022 that this call was coming. Now we are just watching the kid reach over the fence.