We don’t see the defense of illegality much in the product liability space, but when a plaintiff’s claims arises from his or her own illegal behavior, the illegality defense can be a powerful tool. We mention this now because a district court in Kansas recently applied the illegality defense to dismiss a case based on
When Bexis sends around the weekly list of cases, we jump on the ones where the United States is the first listed party. It returns us to our salad days at the U.S. Attorney’s Office way back at the end of the 20th century. (We had more fun, more authority, more hair, and less insomnia
We have a weak spot for criminal cases. We also have a weak spot for doom-scrolling, inevitably provoked by the country’s insane politics over the last eight years. And we have a weak spot for visiting nearby Delaware, home of tax-free shopping, excellent beaches, Dogfish Head Brewery, and judges who know corporate law. We live
Last year the HHS Office of Inspector General issues a “Special Fraud Alert” (“Alert”) concerning “Speaker Programs” – more usually known as continuing medical education (“CME”). Since we believe that truthful commercial speech is First Amendment protected, seeing “fraud” bandied about like this caused us to take a look. We’re well aware that for years
Here’s another quasi-guest post by Reed Smith’s blogger-in-training Dean Balaes. This one provides a critique of the scary Park doctrine, aptly described here as “Frankenstein’s Monster,” that allows imposition of criminal liability on corporate officers for illegality they didn’t even know about.
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In 1816, Mary Shelley and Lord Byron entered into a wager to
We’ve blogged a number of times about how litigation funding arrangements involving personal injuries and mass torts collide with various ethical and statutory obligations owed by either the funders or the lawyers they fund. These all involve United States litigation. But when the New York Times reported on the questionable funding arrangements that have occurred
For most of you, it has been a long time since you thought much about criminal law. Do you remember the hypothetical about the murder victim who perished on a desert hike and it was difficult to pinpoint the criminal(s) because one person had poisoned the water in the victim’s canteen, one had replaced the
Today’s case is, we think (and certainly hope), unlike any other case we have discussed in 2018. To begin with, Duntsch v. State, 2018 Tex. App. LEXIS 10131, 2018 WL 6445369 (Texas Ct. App. 5th Dist. Dec. 10, 2018), is an appeal from a criminal conviction. Since we have droned on incessantly about how
We’ve complained before about the federal government’s monetization of First Amendment violations in the context of truthful promotion of off-label uses:
[T]he government has ruthlessly monetized its questionable ban on truthful off-label promotion for quite a few years now. Indeed, the government has used this ban as the basis for a creeping administrative takeover of
Like many of you, on Friday mornings we turn to the “Legal Lions and Lambs” section of Law360. It is not only voyeurism. We are constantly working on things in media res (the middle of things), building slowly and gradually to a climax that hardly ever arrives. Ninety percent of cases settle, and that is