In 1972, Neil Young wrote his great song, “Alabama,” the lyrics of which included the following: “Alabama, you’ve got the rest of the union, to help you along; what’s going wrong?” Those lyrics occurred to us in 2013, when we read the Weeks decision, in which the Alabama Supreme Court endorsed innovator liability. We get
Regular readers of the blog know and appreciate our focus (fixation?) on the learned intermediary rule. Not because it is fun to say and makes us feel smart. No, we follow and write on the learned intermediary rule because it is a cornerstone of the law on allegedly inadequate drug and device warnings. It holds
While two-fer Tuesday has that nice alliterative ring to it – three-fer Tuesday gives you more bang for your buck. Pleadings, preemption, and personal jurisdiction. Maybe trifecta-Tuesday?
Plaintiff in Froman v. Coopersurgical, Inc., 2022 US Dist LEXIS 120725, *2-3 (N.D.AL Jul. 8, 2022) filed her complaint alleging that she suffered an injury when a
Today’s case is not new to us. A year and a half ago we were extolling the virtues of Blackburn v. Shire U.S., Inc., 2020 WL 2840089 (N.D. Al. June 1, 2020), for granting summary judgment where the testimony from plaintiff and his prescribing physician shot holes in proximate causation too large for a
We wanted avocado toast for lunch a week or two ago. And we had a perfect avocado on the kitchen counter and some nice whole-grain bread in the breadbox. So we cut the avocado in half, “unscrewed” it to leave the pit in one half, then drove the point of a sharp knife into the
Last week we posted about the Daubert decision in Lowery v. Sanofi-Aventis LLC, that tossed out both plaintiff’s medical causation expert and FDA expert. As promised, that was just the first blow. The knockout came in its companion decision granting summary judgement not just on medical causation but also on the grounds of preemption.
It seems fitting that if we are going to talk about a one-two punch, we acknowledge the passing of boxing legend Marvelous Marvin Hagler. The undisputed middleweight champion from 1980 to 1987 whose boxing career started in Massachusetts but who started out a New Jersey boy. Only Jersey Understands Jersey!
From New Jersey to Alabama
Nope, we didn’t bury the lead. Today we are talking about a generic, negligence per se, warnings case that wasn’t decided on preemption grounds. No Mensing. No Buckman. No preemption of any kind. Normally that would make us a little nervous, but no need. It was the learned intermediary doctrine’s day to be
Today we bring you the DDL blog version of the “duck test.” The “duck test” goes like this – if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. When you see a duck swimming in a pond, you don’t normally say: “hey, look
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