There’s a certain romance to the idea that if one courthouse door closes, another—perhaps with better lighting and more favorable precedent—must surely be open somewhere else. But as one group of particularly determined preemption refugees recently learned, civil procedure is not a game of judicial Whac-A-Mole.
The story begins in Utah, where 50 plaintiffs brought
There is a special kind of optimism—some might call it magical thinking—that animates the modern failure-to-warn claim against prescription drug manufacturers. It goes something like this: Yes, the FDA-approved label warned about the exact risk that happened to me, but the manufacturer still failed to warn.
Which is a pretty accurate summary of plaintiff’s argument
There’s a saying that “everyone is entitled to their day in court.” Fair enough. But, to have your day in court, you have to have standing. While the requirements for standing vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, all courts require a plaintiff to have suffered an injury in fact. Afterall, the entire idea
Today’s post is not from the Butler Snow side of the blog.
It’s five days post-Thanksgiving and if you are like the majority of us, there are still leftovers in your fridge. But according to food safety experts, yesterday was likely the last day for the turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, and casseroles. Some legal
Today’s guest post is from Dechert’s Chris McKeon who updates us on a rare application of the political question doctrine. As always, our guest posters deserve 100% of the praise (and any of blame) for their posts. Not that we expect the latter.
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In our earlier post, we explored whether the political question
Defendants know that the quickest way to level an uneven playing field is to… well… sprint. And few procedural tools reward nimble defense work quite like snap removal—the perfectly valid act of removing a case to federal court before the forum defendant is served. Plaintiffs call it gamesmanship. We call it reading the statute. Yet
This post comes from the non-Butler Snow side of the blog.
Today’s case gives us two cautionary tales. First, there are many ways to make friends with a court. Dumping thousands of exhibits onto its doorstep and saying, “You figure it out,” is not one of them. Second, taking documents stamped CONFIDENTIAL or HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL
In the 1980s, when a wave of complicated, expensive, and hard to prove lawsuits against the vaccine industry threatened to drive many manufacturers out of the market and subsequently cause a public health crisis, Congress stepped in and enacted the Vaccine Act which created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. It is designed to strike
We have seen a recent plague of purported class actions against various FDA-regulated OTC products that include allegations of contamination (usually benzene) that are purportedly supported by “independent laboratory” testing. Fortunately, we have also seen these cases dismissed one after another for a variety of reasons, including lack of standing. Today’s case is a great