We posted earlier this year about the failure to warn causation decision from the California Supreme Court in Himes v. Somatics, 549 P.3d 916 (Cal. 2024), and the potential parade of horribles that might ensue. Here comes the grand marshal of the parade.Continue Reading California District Court Punts on Learned Intermediary Causation Post-Himes
Warnings
Plaintiffs Fail to Backdoor Expansive Early Discovery in GLP-1 MDL
We have no personal knowledge of the litigation concerning GLP-1 receptor agonist medications and the Blog has not posted on it yet, but we do know something about litigation over widely used prescription medications. Over the decades, there have been many drugs or classes of drugs that became “blockbusters” because they were widely prescribed to…
Has Albrecht Been Undone?
We do not mean the German Renaissance painter and thinker Albrecht Dürer. His work, while a poor cousin to that of some famous contemporaries to the south, remains as is. We mean the Supreme Court’s decision in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, 587 U.S. 299 (2019), which has been touted for the…
There Is No Substitute: Arizona Law Does Not Permit FDA Warnings To Stand In For Expert Opinion
We reported last year on a case in which the Arizona Court of Appeals allowed FDA-approved drug warnings to define the standard of care for a physician’s informed consent. Why does that matter? Well, in most every jurisdiction, a plaintiff bringing an action for medical negligence has to produce expert opinion that the defendant breached…
Another Pretty Potent Painkiller Preemption Decision
Even though lawyers who bill for their time defending product liability cases might favor those cases sticking around and plaintiffs getting many chances before inevitable dismissals with prejudice, we have been clear that we think plaintiffs should not get to re-plead around preemption once courts have defined the preempted path. There seems to be an…
This Is What The California Supreme Court Did With The Learned Intermediary Rule
The California Supreme Court issued its widely anticipated opinion on the learned intermediary rule the other day, and the opinion is worth the wait. Based on the oral argument (which we reported on here), we did not expect the Supreme Court to enact a fundamental change to the learned intermediary doctrine, and the Court…
Hip Implant Remand Case Mails It In On Expert Motions
We recently recapped the law relating to when experts are allowed to opine on what was in the head of another and how a pending Supreme Court criminal case might affect things. In our area, this issue comes up most frequently in the context of plaintiff experts trying to offer their spin about how the…
California Supreme Court Hears Argument On Learned Intermediary Doctrine
We observed oral argument the other day before the California Supreme Court in Himes v. Somatics, a case that places California’s learned intermediary doctrine squarely in the spotlight. A learned intermediary case before the California Supreme Court? For your ever-vigilant DDL bloggers, that is like Thanksgiving and Christmas wrapped into one!
Who will be…
C.D. Cal. Holds that Breast Implant Manufacturing Defect Claims are Expressly Preempted
Before we dive into today’s case, Avrin v. Mentor Worldwide LLC, 2024 WL 115672 (C.D. Cal. March 15, 2024), we offer two preliminary observations:
1. We love to hear from our readers. Sometimes we get emails commenting on a post. Often, those comments arrive in the form of gushing reviews. That’s nice. Less often…
A Design Defect Claim By Any Other Name . . . Is Still a Design Defect Claim
So plaintiffs learned in the In re: Gardasil Products Liability Litigation, MDL 3036, 2024 WL 1197919 (W.D.N.C. Mar. 20, 2024). Try as they did in 550-paragraph and 120-page complaints to muddle their claims, the court cleared away the muck and found what was left was almost all preempted by the Vaccine Act.
While pending…