In the Mid-Atlantic this week, unless your roots run deep – they are frozen. After a balmy sixty degrees on New Year’s Day, we got hit with our first snowstorm of the winter. As did so many, this blogger’s family had to cancel nearly all our holiday plans. So, on what should have been the
That’s the main lesson of the emerging fiasco that is the ALI’s benignly named “Concluding Provisions” project for the Restatement Third of Torts. While this title suggests that the Institute is merely engaged in routine “mop up” work, nothing could be further from the truth. Any number of significant tort-related topics were not addressed by
Today, we chronicle two more decisions from the Zantac MDL. Once again, kudos to this MDL transferee judge for outstanding willingness to tackle legal issues, and decide them, at an early stage of the litigation. Because we’ve gone through these issues before, here and here, we discuss these latest rulings in one post.
Chronicle
Several significant decisions have recently emerged from the In re Zantac MDL, No. 2924. We gave you a “bare bones” rundown of the first four of them right away. But now we’d like to discuss them in more detail.
We start with In re Zantac (Ranitidine) Products Liability Litigation, ___ F. Supp.3d
We are not going to beat around the bush today. When we see a “prediction” of an “expansion” of state law by a federal court, we have only one question. What about Erie R.R. Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 78 (1938)? That should have been a front and center question for the court
This post is from the non-Dechert side of the Blog.
There were four opinions issued in the Zantac MDL on New Years Eve. We would like to tell you all about them, but we have to seek internal client approvals, and that will take time given the number of defendants. They are important, and overwhelmingly
We have an update today on a case from Idaho on which we blogged late last year. The issue then was innovator liability, and we gave our enthusiastic stamp of approval to the court’s rejection of “product liability” where the innovator manufacturer neither made nor sold the product that allegedly harmed the plaintiff. As the
Sometimes the DDL blog is ahead of the curve. On more than one occasion we’ve advanced the idea that lack of personal jurisdiction should be a good defense to innovator liability in a post-BMS world. After all, BMS held that there was no specific jurisdiction over a plaintiff’s claim just because the defendant allegedly
When we were still (relatively) young lawyers, we defended Bendectin cases. There was nothing wrong with Bendectin – the litigation produced Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on excluding bogus expert testimony, and numerous other decisions, state and federal, excluding “junk science.” Nonetheless, Bendectin’s primary
For a few years, it seemed like we were blogging about the Weeks case every few months. Beyond providing an opportunity for temporal quippery, Weeks caught our attention because it was one of the holdout cases against the tide of cases rejecting Conte, the crappy California case that invented innovator liability. After the