Photo of Stephen McConnell

Medical device preemption should be straightforward.  The statute could not be clearer.  Federal regulation supplants state laws that would impose requirements that are different from or in addition to the federal requirements.  But the law has evolved into a bit of a mess, with misreadings of certain approval/clearance pathways and inventions of exceptions, such as

These days there are two topics that dominate legal conferences, presentations, and CLEs: artificial intelligence (AI) and Loper Bright.  You will doubtless see us frequently bloviate about the former, but today’s case – American Clinical Laboratory Ass’n v. Food and Drug Administration, 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59869, 2025 WL 964236 (E.D. Tex. March

Bergdoll v. Coopersurgical, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 38300 (W.D. Mo. March 4, 2025), is a good Class III medical device preemption decision. The device was a Filshie clip, which is used to perform tubal ligations.  The claim in Bergdoll is the typical one that the clip migrated and caused adverse symptoms. Bergdoll is

The Butler Snow contingent on the DDL blogging team had nothing to do with this post. 

New York law is surprisingly good for defendants.  Or maybe we’re jaded by bad experiences in other jurisdictions, and New York law manages to seem fair only by comparison.  Certainly, we’d rather be in a courtroom in New York

We’ve written many blogposts kvetching about rulings in the Bair Hugger Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) out in Minneapolis.  See here, for example. The rulings on expert admissibility in the Bair Hugger MDL were particularly weak.  But surely the rulings would be much better in our home district of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, right? And

In the litigation strategy class we teach at Penn Law, we always set aside a few minutes to go over the Aristotelian rhetoric trilogy of logos, pathos. and ethos.  As you probably already know, logos is the persuasive value of an argument’s logic, pathos is the power of sympathy, and ethos refers to one’s character