As readers who use our No Injury Scorecard know, we’re very interested in identifying situations where plaintiffs – and especially consumer fraud plaintiffs – get dismissed because they don’t have (or don’t choose to allege) a legally sufficient injury.
Why?
Class actions, mostly. As we’ve pointed out before, the plaintiff-side class action aggregators have
One Two Medical Device Punch
A tip of the cyberhat to Tom Stayton at Baker & Daniels for passing along this little gem. In Feusting v. Zimmer, No. 02-2251, 2009 WL 174163 (C.D. Ill. Jan. 26, 2009), a case involving a prosthetic knee joint, the court granted summary judgment, after concluding under a Daubert analysis that the plaintiff’s
Seroquel MDL Summary Judgment Order
Shoot!
We reported last week that Judge Anne Conway had orally granted summary judgment in the first two test cases in the Seroquel MDL, and that a written order would be forthcoming.
We checked the MDL docket last night and didn’t see an order, so we told you this morning that the promised written order
Seroquel MDL: Motions In Limine Granted
We reported last week that Judge Anne Conway, who’s overseeing the Seroquel MDL, had granted summary judgment in favor of AstraZeneca in the bellwether cases involving the first two plaintiffs. She had not yet issued her written decision at that time.
She still hasn’t entered that written decision. (We just couldn’t leave you hanging there.)
Refunds and Ascertainable Loss
There’s an interesting new decision from the appellate division of the NJ Superior Court, Hoffman v. Hampshire Labs. It’s not a prescription drug case – rather it’s about one of those products typically advertised in those emails that then (we hope) go off to die unread in our spam filters. Hoffman was brought under
The Procedural Effect of MDL Master Complaints
By now, you know the drill:
Plaintiffs file complaints in federal courts in, say, Alabama, Illinois, and Florida. Ordinarily, the choice-of-law rules of the courts in which the cases were filed — Alabama, Illinois, and Florida, respectively — would govern those cases.
But what happens if the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transfers all of
Government By Contingent Fee In Pennsylvania
We’ve posted before – here, here, and here – about the constitutionality issues (among many other problems) that we think are inherent whenever governmental units hire, without legislative approval, private outside contingent fee counsel to sue people (especially our clients) for money damages. Indeed, the issue is pending right now in the Supreme
Defense Wins Summary Judgment In First Seroquel Test Cases
As Product Liability Law360 (subscription required), Bloomberg News , AmLaw, and several plaintiff blogs have already mentioned, AstraZeneca scored big yesterday in the Seroquel litigation. Bloomberg reports that “AstraZeneca faces about 9000 lawsuits with more than 15,000 plaintiffs in the U.S. over claims that Seroquel causes diabetes.” The news is that yesterday Chief Judge
A Grace Note To Beisner And Miller
We enjoyed John Beisner and Jessica Miller’s paper, “Litigate the Torts, Not the Mass: A Modest Proposal for Reforming How Mass Torts are Adjudicated,” just published by the Washington Legal Foundation. (We liked Richard Nagareda’s foreword to the monograph, too. And we’re pleased to see that the authors are giving a talk based on their
The Ethics Of Genetic Research
This guest post was written by J.C. McElveen, of Jones Day. We thank him for the contribution:
In the late 1980s, members of the Havasupai tribe, an Indian tribe that lives at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, approached an Arizona State University anthropologist with whom the tribe had been working for several decades