Did you remember that there can be express preemption for over-the-counter drugs? We sometimes forget too, but there are really good reasons for that. The Food Drug and Cosmetic Act includes the following provision:
[N]o State or political subdivision of a State may establish or continue in effect any requirement – (1) that relates to
California courts continue to find ways to exercise personal jurisdiction over out-of-state defendants, even when there is little or no dispute that the Constitution and the United States Supreme Court’s opinion in Bristol-Meyers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court do not permit it. “Resistance” is probably too strong a word, insofar as it calls up images
We have always thought that regulatory approval or clearance of a drug or medical device should weigh heavily against punitive damages, or even preclude punitive damages altogether. An Arizona statute says exactly that, and now a trial court in Phoenix has applied that statute to dismiss punitive damages in a case involving a medical device
The California Court of Appeal has finally filed its opinion in the much-discussed talc ovarian cancer case, Echeverria v. Johnson & Johnson, No. B286283, 2019 WL 3001626 (Cal. Ct. App. July 9, 2019), and while it is not a complete win for the defense, it was close, and there is much to talk about.
We received positive feedback on our recent post on the Vaccine Act, so a recent Sixth Circuit opinion affirming a dismissal under the Act caught our eye. In our last post, we described how the Vaccine Act sets up a no-fault claims process that claimants have to exhaust before they can sue in a
We continue to scratch our heads over consumer class actions seeking monetary compensation when the customers received exactly what they paid for. We see them from time to time in the pharmaceutical space, where patients claim monetary compensation even though the prescription drugs they used worked like they were supposed to with no adverse reactions.
This is the second in a two-part series on attorney-client privilege and work product protection. We did not plan it this way, but our recent This Is Why Board Presentations Are Privileged And Protected blogpost generated a lot of interest, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court issued an important opinion last week on these topics, so
It is a fairly common situation. A company is facing an issue that someone thinks the board of directors ought to know about, so general counsel retains outside counsel to provide advice. Maybe outside counsel prepares a memo. Maybe he or she appears at a board meeting to give a presentation with others from the
We take every chance we can get to drive nails into the coffin of the Ninth Circuit’s spectacularly wrong opinion in Stengel v. Medtronic. That’s the case where the court held that federal law did not preempt negligence claims alleging that the defendant medical device manufacturer failed adequately to report adverse events to the
Bexis is going to have to give up saying that nothing good ever comes out of Missouri, because for the second time in just a few months we are reporting on a well-reasoned opinion from Missouri that comes to the right result for the right reasons. In Fullerton v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., No.