In the coming weeks, there are sure to be many articles looking at what Judge Brown Jackson has written and what that might suggest about the future jurisprudence of the United States Supreme Court if she is confirmed. We will not predict what will happen in confirmation. We will, however, weigh in on what Judge
It is Groundhog Day. So we will write about a fact pattern we’ve written about before. Multiple times.
We cringe whenever we see a case involving over-the-counter (OTC) drugs and children. It brings back memories of lawsuits with sympathetic plaintiffs and difficult facts. We remember one case in which a three year old gobbled half
Last year we reported on Plourde v. Sorin Group USA, Inc., 2021 WL 736153 (D. Mass. 2021), which held that the plaintiff’s failure-to-warn claims were expressly preempted by 21 U.S.C. § 360k(a) because those claims were based on an alleged failure to report adverse events to the FDA and the plaintiff had not shown
Discovery can be very expensive. Defendants really like to win on motions to dismiss in part because they get to avoid the costs of discovery. We can pile on these shockingly obvious statements with two more. From a defense perspective, a narrow scope of discovery tends to be a good thing. If narrow discovery leads
We’ve commented extensively on COVID–19–related vaccination cases, because vaccines are prescription medical products. We haven’t commented on another aspect of litigation intended to sabotage public health efforts to combat the COVID-19 pandemic – attacks on masking requirements − mostly because masks don’t require prescriptions. The kind of masks involved in
It has been a while since we’ve written about a case delivering a one-two punch against a plaintiff suing both brand and generic drug manufacturers for alleged injuries from ingesting generic drugs. Punch One is rejection of the claims against the brand manufacturers because they did not make or sell the products at issue in
Last week the Third Circuit became the first federal appellate court to decide the question of whether federal courts have jurisdiction over COVID-related tort litigation. It concluded they did not. Maglioli v. Alliance HC Holdings LLC, — F.4th –, 2021 WL 4890189 (3d. Cir. Oct. 20, 2021). A decision directly at odds with
A short and sweet report today on Lowe v. Walgreens Boots All., Inc., 2021 WL 4772293 (N.D. Cal. 2021), a recent decision dismissing a putative class action that sought to assert a variety of California state-law claims against the sellers of a generic drug based on the drug’s labeling. The court dismissed three of
As we age, we sometimes forget how things used to be. It is not just age-related deterioration of the synapses in our hippocampi. (We do question why hippocampi and hippopotamuses are the preferred plural forms these days and why more anatomic structures are not named for things like seahorses.) There is also a recency effect.
After getting off to a rocky start a few years ago on preemption, cases in the Birmingham hip MDL are falling like dominoes. And just like last week’s case, the decision in Sedgwick v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 157412 (D. Md. Aug. 19, 2021) falls apart at the summary