Another year bites the dust. We have just about made it through 2023, and while we have compiled our annual top ten best prescription medical product liability litigation decisions, we have the same sense with these as we did with last week’s bottom ten – in 2023 the favorable (as well as unfavorable) results from
Lists
Malarkey − The Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2023
The Thrill of Victory – The Ten Best Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2022
So, another year has passed. 2022 is in the books and the republic still stands, even if Roe v. Wade (and, soon, Twitter) do not. The COVID-19 pandemic – if not COVID-19 itself, which has instead become endemic – is largely over, except for some probably PREP Act preempted shouting.
For the Blog, the end of the year means that it’s time for our annual celebration of the Drug & Device Law Blog’s top ten decisions of the year. Some of these cases establish important legal principles, such as preemption, Rule 702 expert exclusion (don’t say Daubert), or the learned intermediary rule. Others are important because they affect large numbers of cases gathered in the increasingly dysfunctional federal multi-district litigation system. Some do both. In either event, these decisions make the legal world at least somewhat less dangerous for our clients and (not incidentally) more favorable for us defense lawyers.Continue Reading The Thrill of Victory – The Ten Best Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2022
The Agony of Defeat -The Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2022
It’s that time of year again – time to review drug and medical device product liability litigation during 2022 and select the year’s ten worst decisions. Frankly, it’s not that hard to do – they reek to high heaven, so they are pretty easy to find. What’s harder is finding the motivation to write about decisions that we find profoundly distasteful for one reason or another. It’s fun to write about wins, but not about losses, so watch for decisions we might not have addressed previously.Continue Reading The Agony of Defeat -The Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2022
The Ten Best Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2021
2021 is almost over. Before 2021 – indeed, before the last half of 2021 – practically nobody other than stargazers had ever heard of “omicron,” unless someone was part of some fraternity or sorority. Now everybody has. The omicron viral variant demonstrates, once again in real time (as had the delta variant before it)…
The Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2021
We’re tired – Tired of blatant lying about COVID-19 and the vaccines that can stop it. Tired of miserable, selfish people who won’t take basic, proven health precautions to combat COVID-19, endangering not only themselves, but everyone else as well. We’re tired of obstructionist politicians who cynically seek to prolong the pandemic for political ends. …
Tort Pandemic Countermeasures − The Ten Best Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2020
With 2020 mercifully coming to an end, it is once again time for the Drug & Device Law Blog’s top ten decisions of the year. In keeping with COVID-19’s dominance of 2020, we present our top ten in the context of countermeasures against another social ill – the tort pandemic raging across much of the…
Going Viral − The Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2020
Once again we undertake our annual task of sorting through the worst decisions of the year in prescription medical product liability litigation. These are the true superspreaders of litigation against our clients, extending the contagion of non-socially distanced litigation tourism and other infectious forms of attorney-solicited lawsuits far and wide, to the detriment of almost…
Elysian Fields − The Top Ten Best Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2019
Welcome to our annual Elysium tour, in which we electronically acknowledge the sweet nectar of victory flowing from the top ten drug/device product liability decisions of the year. It’s time to salute those fortunate decisions that brought the judicial Midas touch to our clients’ cases. We echo what we said last year: “we’re looking…
Stygian Depths − The Bottom Ten Worst Prescription Drug/Medical Device Decisions of 2019
You know it’s coming. It’s unavoidable, but necessary. We don’t like it any more than you do, but it’s that time of year. Time to recapitulate the worst punishments that the denizens of the you-know-where tort Tartari have inflicted upon our clients and us in 2019. Every year we contemplate our Sisyphean labors facing the…