Express Preemption

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Today we report on a recent decision dismissing manufacturing-defect, warranty, and failure-to-warn claims arising from an allegedly defective breast implant. Although the decision, D’Addario v. Johnson & Johnson, 2021 WL 1214896 (D.N.J. 2021), does not stray far from the beaten path, it covers ground worth revisiting. The decision is a useful (if cursory) reminder…

Critics have been known to accuse us of being too hard on product liability plaintiffs and too forgiving of defendants who develop medical products.  We all have our biases, especially after many collective decades of representing the latter group, but we do think the table is often tilted in favor of the former group.  One…

Albert Einstein supposedly said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  He may not have, but the point is well taken.  We often think the same thing – particularly about plaintiffs that sue manufacturers of FDA premarket-approved (“PMA”) medical devices with vague, boilerplate complaints.  Haven’t they heard about…

Could a tax case ever make for interesting reading? To our surprise, the answer is Yes. In our end-of-year excavation of older cases we missed when they first came out, we unearthed Rowitz v. Tax Commisioner of Ohio, 2019 WL 7489061 (Ohio Ct. App. Dec. 31, 2019). The plaintiffs in that case applied for…

Perhaps the biggest conflict among the circuits in PMA preemption cases involves the extent to which plaintiffs can get away with pleading essentially nothing to support supposed “parallel” violation claims, on the one hand, or on the other must plead a particularized violation of an FDA regulation (usually a “Current Good Manufacturing Practice” or “CGMP”)…

The decision in In re Bard IVC Filters Products Liability Litigation, 969 F.3d 1067 (9th Cir. 2020) (“Booker”), is yet another reminder that multidistrict litigation as it is currently conducted is a fundamentally flawed process, dedicated more to forcing settlements than to any of the goals envisioned by Congress when it passed…