As we approach the end of the year, we turn to reflecting on the events of the passing year. We do it here on the DDL blog with our best of and worst of posts. It is often a time to consider just how much (or how little) was accomplished in the course of a
As we mentioned in our recent Preemption Teaser post, last month’s concurrence in denial of certiorari in Lipschultz v. Charter Advanced Services (MN), LLC, ___ S. Ct. ___, 2019 WL 5300908 (U.S. Oct. 21, 2019), provides an indication that, at least to some extent, Justice Thomas might have found a kindred spirit of sorts
It wasn’t an opinion, or a grant of certiorari, but it may be important nonetheless. In a concurrence in the denial of certiorari the other day, Justices Thomas and Gorsuch expounded on their view of how preemption works (or doesn’t work) in the context of a decision by a federal agency (not the FDA
Back in 2012, we published our “Distribute This!” post about In re Fosamax (Alendronate Sodium) Products Liability Litigation (No. II), 2012 WL 181411 (D.N.J. Jan. 17, 2012), lauding its ruling that, under the “independence principle” of PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, 564 U.S. 604 (2011), and Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett,
In a significant PMA preemption win, the Ninth Circuit rejected a plaintiff’s attempt, in a breast implant case, to base a “parallel” violation claim on nothing more than a res ipsa loquitur inference. Weber v. Allergan, Inc., ___ F.3d ___, 2019 WL 5090757 (9th Cir. Oct. 11, 2019). Weber involved a Class III breast
The last baseball player to reach a .400 batting average for a season was Ted Williams in 1941. In a sport that probably keeps more stats than any other, baseball sees records broken and milestones reached all the time. Some marks, however, appear to be set in stone. One of these is Ted Williams’s 1941
Did you ever read something and think – I couldn’t have said it better myself. Sometimes we read opinions that give us just that feeling. A decision that ticks all of the boxes and leaves us wondering why everybody doesn’t see how easy it is to reach the right conclusion. Brooks v. Mentor Worldwide, LLC
One of the more peculiar things about Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 139 S. Ct. 1668 (U.S. 2019) (“Albrecht”), is the almost off-hand way that the majority (made up mostly of justices that have opposed preemption in closer cases) wandered away from the procedural preemption issues that the Court was
Various plaintiff-side consortia have taken it into their heads to sue every manufacturer of so-called “novel oral anticoagulants” because these products, gasp, can cause serious, and sometime fatal, bleeding incidents. Fortunately, on the whole the plaintiffs haven’t done so well with these cases – losing almost all the trials – because jurors can be taught
We had been waiting for the Utah Supreme Court’s decision in Burningham v. Wright Medical for some time. As we pointed out in a blogpost when Burningham was first certified by the district court (Utah is one of the few courts allowing district court certification), over a year ago, “[p]ractically no court has . .