A plaintiff lawyer recently filed a case against our client in North Carolina. He has made a settlement demand that any rational observer would regard as ambitious to the point of outrageous. Despite that crazy number, we are on fairly friendly terms with the plaintiff lawyer. We jawbone at each other in a generally good
After recent posts on the AHM (or Hippo) litigation, we read the excellent FDA reply brief and considered yet another post on the subject. With the oral argument before the Fifth Circuit yesterday and more briefs and decisions to come, we elected to deal with a topic that was not quite so weighty. In
The recent decision of the Hawai’i Supreme Court in State ex rel. Shikada v. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., ___ P.3d ___, 2023 WL 2519857 (Haw. March 15, 2023), isn’t all bad by any means – but it’s bad enough, and it carries with it the prospect of liability based on a virtually limitless number of individualized genetic traits, so you can bet we’re not very happy after reading it.
You’d be right.
In our first appellate oral argument we found ourselves in front of a very hot Ninth Circuit panel (that means lots of questions). We danced our hardest to affirm the district court’s denial of a criminal defendant’s motion to suppress. The problem was that the lower court had wandered onto shaky ground. We knew it.
The plaintiffs in Acosta-Aguayo v. Walgreen Co., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 34836 (N.D. Ill. March 2, 2023), visited their friendly neighborhood drug store and bought a lawsuit. Well, first they bought pain relief patches. Those patches were over the counter (OTC) products. No prescriptions were required. Maybe those pain patches worked and maybe they
Today’s case is not about drugs or medical devices. It is about popcorn, a perfect prompt (or as good as ours ever get) for a rant about movies. We are working our way through the Oscar nominees, in anticipation of the upcoming Academy Awards. (Pre-apocalypse, we hosted an annual Oscar party, featuring good food, good
Some of us on the Blog are veterans of the original vaccine wars – those that preceded the enactment of the Vaccine Act, 42 U.S.C. §§300aa-10, et seq. That litigation, involving DTP and certain other childhood vaccines, nearly destroyed this country’s ability to vaccinate its children against often deadly diseases – much to the delight of antivaxxers everywhere. After Congress acted in 1986, much to the delight of everyone else, the Act’s alternative compensation system, combined with its strong preemption provisions restricting post-compensation system litigation have largely restored the nation’s childhood vaccine supply to a sound footing. The Supreme Court did its part in Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223, 231-33 (2011), holding that the Vaccine Act preempted all design defect claims asserted by claimants who rejected Vaccine Act awards and sought to litigate their claims instead.
Readers may recall our dissection of the ridiculous application of offensive, non-mutual collateral estoppel in Freeman v. Ethicon, Inc., 2022 WL 3147194 (C.D. Cal. 2022). Ultimately, the thumb that Freeman put on the scale didn’t matter, because the defendant won at trial despite that handicap.
We described the prior adverse decision that formed the ground for the collateral estoppel claim as “factual findings entered by a state-court judge after a bench trial in earlier false-advertising and unfair-competition litigation.” That description doesn’t really do the prior decision (in)justice. That decision, People v. Johnson & Johnson, 2020 WL 603964 (Cal. Super. Jan. 30, 2020), decided an action filed by the California attorney general that had essentially converted the allegations that product liability plaintiffs had been making against the defendants’ pelvic mesh into the basis for a statewide civil action under certain California consumer protection statutes. Here is the result of that decision, in a nutshell:
Continue Reading Interesting Pelvic Mesh Due Process Certiorari Petition
Tonight, with great pleasure, we will hand out candy to tiny costumed neighbors – the three- and five-year-olds from across the street, who call us “Miss Rachel,” and the seven- and 10-year-olds from next door, who come over daily to play with the new puppy, among others. (Not too many others, we fear – we
Okay, retail shelves don’t have eyes. We coined that phrase to mimic the title of the Wes Craven films featuring desert mutants and the horror they impose on unsuspecting travelers. We watched the original 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes while traveling a few years back and thought it was not that great. Imagine then