Kelly v. Ethicon, Inc., 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 191665 (N.D. Iowa Oct. 16, 2020), is a remanded pelvic mesh case. The complaint included the usual panoply of causes of action for negligence, strict liability, fraud, and breach of warranty. Failure to warn, as usual, was central to the plaintiff’s case.
During the years while
Last Saturday was World Mental Health Day. We hope you celebrated by getting outdoors in the very pleasant weather typical of early October throughout this beautiful country. We hope you also spent a few moments taking stock of your own mental wellbeing. Lawyers do not conduct such a self-assessment nearly enough. We are focused on
Lyons v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2020 WL 5835125 (N.D. Ga. Sept. 29, 2020), was a wrongful death action alleging that the anticoagulant drug Pradaxa was defective and not accompanied by adequate warnings that blood plasma concentrations should be monitored and that certain patient characteristics, such as age, renal impairments, and concomitant statin
Can a court decision be simultaneously depressing and exhilarating? You might be surprised how often that happens. In United States v. Facteau, 2020 WL 5517573, (D. Mass. Sept. 14, 2020), the court upheld criminalization of off-label promotion, but did so in a way that might signal the end of an era in which pharmaceutical
We slipped our summer vacation in just before summer slipped away. Last week, we walked the rocky shores of Cape Cod, ate lobstah rolls the size of trolley cars, and navigated our way through the traffic catastrophes charmingly known in New England as “rotaries.” On our last day in the Bay State, the temperature plunged.
The Covid-19 lockdown period is approaching the six-month mark, from mid-March to mid-September. Throughout the spring and summer we have been reading old novels with convoluted plots and surprise endings. Today we take a look at an old case, though only from a prior decade, not a prior century. If the case is convoluted, it
We often say, as we said last week, that this blog is not designed to do plaintiffs’ work for them. Thus, we are a heckuva lot more likely to trumpet pro-defense rulings than wrong ones. Still, it is important to know the problem areas out there, and today’s case displays one of them. It
It is an old legal adage that hard cases make bad law. One could also say that big cases make bad law, especially if by “big” we include Multi-District Litigation (MDL) cases. When a federal judge is suddenly in charge of thousands of cases, that judge will too often start thinking more like a manager
As we round the clubhouse turn and head into the home stretch of this annus horribilis, our nominee for the word of 2020 is “doom-scrolling.“ We’ve sacrificed entire nights of sleep to our iPads, pursuing the latest news (real, fake, or hybrid) of infectious diseases of both the body and the body politic. Three
We’re taking a timeout from our summer reading parade of baggy 19th Century novels. After gorging ourselves on Dickens, Dostoyevsky, Thackeray, Trollope, and Tolstoy, it was time for a palate cleanser. We kept Anna Karenina on the sideboard and picked up a slim volume of Bertrand Russell’s essays.
Analytic philosophy always left us cold. Perhaps