Every day our inbox overflows with legal news aggregation emails. Some of the items are useful. Some must have been authored by Captain Obvious. Some are irrelevant to our practice. We would have thought that comfortably residing in that last category are discussions of the burgeoning marijuana field. The “Week in Weed” and other such
When the blog receives a case that is a bit off-center, involving odd facts or a different area of law, we grab it as our weekly writing assignment. If it’s a criminal matter, our claim is premised on our stint as a prosecutor. Today’s case is a securities class action, permitting us to relive our
This post comes from the Cozen O’Connor side of the blog.
Michigan’s product liability statute says that a drug is neither defective nor unreasonably dangerous, and the manufacturer and seller cannot be liable in a product liability suit, if the FDA approved it and the drug and its labeling were in compliance with that
The toughest thing about defending product liability cases is the occasional immersion in human misery. Securities and antitrust cases pose intellectual challenges but they are, in the end, pretty much about money. By contrast, the plaintiffs in our cases are claiming injuries to their bodies, not just their wallets. Sometimes those alleged injuries are phony
Recently Rudy Giuliani was broiled for saying that the truth isn’t the truth. Denying a tautology won’t typically earn one high marks for logic. Add in the callback to Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth” question, and it sounds like bad epistemology in service of bad morality. But we’re not here to talk politics. Nor are
For at least forty years we’ve been hearing that soccer is going to supplant baseball, basketball, or football among America’s top three sports. It hasn’t happened. Maybe we heirs of Washington, Jefferson, Ruth, Rice, and Chamberlain have limited enthusiasm for one-nil scores and players diving and mimicking death throes in a cheap effort to extract
A myth that has regrettably gained some traction lately is that the FDA’s clearance of a medical device under the 510(k) substantial equivalence process is unrelated to safety and efficacy. One notably unfair manifestation of this myth is the entry of orders in limine in a number of recent medical device cases excluding evidence of
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
Today is a follow-up post on Bell v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharms, No. 17-1153, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 90337 (W.D. PA. May 31, 2018). When we last blogged about this case back in February, the court had tossed out everything except negligence and fraud/misrepresentation
Is fear of injury the same thing as injury? The question answers itself. At least it should. They are not the same, and there are strong jurisprudential reasons for courts to throw out cases alleging mere fear of injury. We have a No Injury scorecard documenting a pretty clear court consensus that fear of injury
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
We’ve posted on two other occasions about the Shuker v. Smith & Nephew case as the Eastern District of Pennsylvania systematically dismantled the case on the grounds of preemption and pleading deficiencies. You can find those posts here and here. Unfortunately, the recent