The recent case of Happel v. Guilford County Bd. of Educ., 2025 N.C. LEXIS 191, 2025 WL 879618 (N.C. March 21, 2005), will probably provoke a political debate, but that is not why your friendly neighborhood DDL blog has it up for discussion today. In Happel, the North Carolina Supreme Court created an
Bergdoll v. Coopersurgical, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 38300 (W.D. Mo. March 4, 2025), is a good Class III medical device preemption decision. The device was a Filshie clip, which is used to perform tubal ligations. The claim in Bergdoll is the typical one that the clip migrated and caused adverse symptoms. Bergdoll is
Rieger v. Medtronic Minimed, Inc., 2025 Cal. Super. Lexis 14 (Cal. Super. L.A. Cnty. Jan. 28, 2025), is an excellent PMA preemption decision from, of all places, Los Angeles County Superior Court, in California – home of the notorious “the Bank” courthouse. We have no idea whether Rieger was adjudicated in LA’s Central Civil West Courthouse, but that is the first thing we defense hacks think of when we see a “Cal. Super. L.A. Cnty.” citation.
But a few more like Rieger, and maybe we won’t any longer.
Continue Reading Taking Preemption to the Bank
Like the radio stations of yore did with songs, we offer up two related posts back-to-back instead of the usual one. We cannot offer a “favorite artist” as the source of consecutive songs, we offer two posts that relate to the legal implications of some of the typical things that FDA does and has been
When we first read what the claims were in Cohen v. Saraya USA Inc., (E.D.N.Y. Jan. 20, 2025), we thought of the old Catskills joke about the elderly couple at dinner:
Wife: “The food here has really gotten terrible.”
Husband: “Yes. And such small portions.”
The plaintiff in Cohen filed a class
It might seem that we talk about preemption incessantly on this blog, but a pretty good opinion from a pretty important jurisdiction went unremarked by us last September. We’ll rectify that right now. Call it an end of year clean up session.
The decision in Howard v. Alchemee, LLC, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 169359
Today we report on the court’s order granting Defendant’s motion to dismiss in Keim-Bacon v. Stryker Corp., No. 4:22-CV-00383-WPJ-MTS, 2024 WL 4886051, at *1 (N.D. Okla. Nov. 25, 2024). It is a straightforward application of Riegel preemption that gets it right on all fronts.
The Scandinavian Total Ankle Replacement System (“STAR”) is a Class
From our very first post back in early 2020 on preclusive power of the PREP Act, 42 U.S.C. §247d-6d, we were impressed by the scope of its combined preemption and immunity language. There, we quoted the language from the HHS secretary’s emergency declaration:
[A] covered person shall be immune from suit and liability under federal and state law with respect to all claims for loss caused by, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the administration to or use by an individual of a covered countermeasure.
Quoting 85 Fed. Reg. 15198, 15199 (HHS March 17, 2020).
Continue Reading Deconstructing the PREP Act
When it comes to MDLs that concern a bunch of cases about a drug or device, they typically have a name like “In re [name of product(s)] Product Liability Litigation” or “In re [name of product(s) Marketing and Sales Practices Litigation.” In theory, the first group of MDLs involves, shockingly, product
