Our best college era summer job was working as a staffer for the New Jersey State Senate. The Abscam investigation was ongoing, and it seemed that every week there’d be another empty seat in the Senate chamber courtesy of the FBI. Good times. We doubt we personally performed any services that were useful for Garden
We have often characterized preemption as one of the most powerful tools in product liability defense lawyers’ toolboxes. It also gets utilized effectively by lawyers defending against a variety of consumer fraud cases about FDA-regulated products. We have, for instance, covered a number of decisions where plaintiffs complained about a range of food labeling issues
We often marvel at how plaintiffs’ attorneys find new ways to sue businesses, including under RICO. Take for example the ever-increasing number of “MSP” plaintiffs that we are seeing in the published opinions. We see plaintiffs called MSP Recovery, MSPA Claims, MSP Series, MSP-MAO, etc., and we are told that many or all of them
South Carolina is a lovely state with mostly lovely weather, though this time of year its appearance on the map looks like the country’s jutted chin daring a hurricane to sock it. South Carolina courts have been known to sock it to defendants, particularly in asbestos cases.
Luckily, asbestos has nothing to do with today’s
Long, long ago, when we clerked for a federal district judge, we handled more than a few prisoner cases. We have to confess that many of the ones we saw were humorous to us, because they alleged a range of perceived slights and personal affronts as violations of their constitutional rights. (As readers know, we
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.Continue Reading Trouble in Paradise
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