There is an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington DC showing a warrior with eyes on the back of his head and a blank, eyeless face on the front. That odd image reflects the profound truth that we have seen what has already happened but are blind to the future.
From our days as a prosecutor, we built up a healthy respect for the power of conspiracy claims. They can be a splendid tool for dragging in more defendants, beating the rule against hearsay (coconspirator statement exception), beating the statute of limitations (a continuing conspiracy can bring even old statements up to date), and telling
Today’s post looks at a case where a defendant was in the wrong place. You might say the same thing about us. As you read this, we are on summer holiday. Because our vacation almost always takes place, as it does this year, during the Drug and Device Son’s birthday, he has veto power over
As a young associate, we worked for a short time with then soon-to-be-Judge Harvey Bartle. We remember that, although kind and very funny, then-lawyer Bartle had a no-nonsense approach to law practice and a keen ability to discern the correct answer, sweeping aside fluff and obstacles en route to what made sense. We were excited
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