It is not as if the Wednesday slot is reserved for flakey stuff, but we’ll confess a weakness for cases from the Ninth Circuit, where we clerked. A lot of craziness percolates up through federal courts out there. We also have a soft spot for cases that are not exactly in the product liability heartland
Bexis knows that cases like Daughtry v. Silver Fern Chemical, Inc., 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 11431, 2025 WL 1364806 (5th Cir. May 12, 2025), hit our sweet spot. It is a civil case, but it also emits a whiff of criminal law. It purports to be, among other things, a product liability case, but it turns
We’ve written before about the long-running Muldoon v. DePuy Orthopedics lawsuit. For one thing, it’s been around forever – its facts are almost as old as the Blog. As we stated here:
Muldoon . . . is a suit over hip-replacement surgery conducted in 2007. Suit was not filed, however, until 2015 – undoubtedly Muldoon is another example of the flotsam and jetsam dredged up by MDL lawyer solicitation. So Muldoon was stale from the beginning. But it got worse. For some eight years, Muldoon sat in the horribly mismanaged Pinnacle Hip MDL in Texas. It appears that nothing at all happened during those years . . . [until] 2023, when the case was ultimately remanded, without comment. So, due to the combined lassitude of the plaintiffs and MDL management, the suit is nearly 14½ years post-surgery, and only now being addressed on the pleadings.
(citations and quotation marks omitted).
Finally, in Muldoon v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 2025 U.S. Dist. Lexis 34013 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 25, 2025), it was dismissed with prejudice. And in the end, the plaintiff didn’t even put up a fight. Faced with the defendant’s latest dismissal motion, “[p]laintiff has declined to file any opposition.” Id. at *2. What was at stake this time were the claims that had survived the defendant’s first dismissal motion against the plaintiff’s absurdly excessive 18-count post-MDL amended complaint. We had some words to say about that complaint as well: “It is a dog’s breakfast. Or it is what our dogs deliver to our yard right after consuming their breakfast.”Continue Reading Muldoon Dismissed – The End of an Error?
From its start, the Blog has railed against certain expansions of traditional product liability that could have negative impacts on scientific progress and the availability of good medical products. Innovator liability, first described in Conte back in 2008, is a good example of a bad idea. Its offspring, the so-called duty to innovate
The Ohio Supreme Court’s decision in In re National Prescription Opiate Litigation, ___ N.E.3d ___, 2024 WL 5049302, 2024 Ohio Lexis 2785 (Ohio Dec. 10, 2024), which was our third best case of that year, was primarily a statutory interpretation case involving the Ohio Product Liability Act (“OPLA”), and specifically Ohio Rev. Code §2307.71(b)
Long ago, a senior partner told us that clear writing flows from clear thinking. That might be so, but clear thinking and clear writing do not necessarily produce the correct result. For example, you’d have a tough time finding a legal opinion written more clearly than Calchi v. Topco Assocs., LLC, 2024 U.S. Dist.
We have often characterized judicial options as mixed bags, and a recent example of such a mixed bag can be found in Muldoon v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130020 (N.D. Cal. July 23, 2024). The plaintiff claimed injuries from a ceramic-on-metal hip implant. He alleged that friction and wear caused the
We have seen a number of consumer fraud class action cases brought over a range of fairly ticky tacky issues about OTC drugs and consumer products. California law and courts have been fairly favorable to these cases, which follow a pattern of a test plaintiff seeking to represent some large class because (s)he claims to
Few things in the law are as subject to abuse as the False Claims Act, 31 USC section 3729 et seq. (the FCA). It was originally enacted to stop massive frauds perpetrated by large contractors during the Civil War. Now it is a litigation cottage industry.
In United States ex rel. Bennett v. Bayer Corp