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
It’s not unusual for us to disagree with a decision from a state’s highest court. Indeed, we did so vehemently not long ago with a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. But even when we disagree, we rarely encounter decisions that make us cringe as much as Russell v. Johnson & Johnson, ___ S.W.3d
A great woman once said “When they go low, we go high.” Apropos of nothing in particular these days, we have been thinking about the issue of tone recently. For instance, what is the exact line between a negative political advertisement and a positive one? Are there circumstances where a candidate might suspend negative ads
Most of the controversy in the recent decision, Hill v. Bayer Corp., 2020 WL 5367334 (E.D. Mich. Sept. 8, 2020), revolved around whether the plaintiff could assert a cause of action for failure to report adverse product events to the FDA. Like the great majority of decisions (particularly since Conklin v. Medtronic, Inc.,
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.
Defendant manufacturers of FDA-approved Class III medical devices generally do pretty well with preemption motions, as our PMA Preemption Score Card (now with well over 500 decisions) demonstrates. Conley v. St. Jude Medical, LLC, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL 5087889 (M.D. Pa. Aug. 28, 2020), is one of these, but some aspects of
Sometimes we write on issues for peculiar reasons. Today, for example, a case on a certain topic caught our eye because of its catchy name: Clark v. Perfect Bar. So many questions arise from this concise, yet provocative tag. Did the owner of the 100-year-old brand Clark Bar get sideways with a modern upstart
One of the cases we follow closely, with daily searches, is Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 139 S. Ct. 1668 (U.S. 2019). It’s an implied preemption case, so while we like to think we catch all the drug/device cases anyway, Albrecht can affect preemption in a wide variety of tort situations.
We’d
In the ever-extending period of working from home and social distancing, we have spent some time watching various exemplars of the “superhero” genre and noted that the uber kitschy afterschool and weekend morning staple of our youth is not being recreated. (If Stevie Mac is from the Pleistocene, then our youth was in the
The recent decision in Mize v. Mentor Worldwide LLC, ___ Cal. Rptr.3d ___, 2020 WL 3602482 (Cal. App. July 2, 2020), demonstrates why California courts – particularly state courts – have such a poor reputation when it comes to product-related litigation. In Mize, a combination of questionable reasoning, together with the state’s absurdly