Photo of Susanna Moldoveanu

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

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Both sides in Gilead v. Superior Court have filed their opening briefs in the California Supreme Court, and the extreme nature of the California Court of Appeal’s opinion extending a manufacturer’s duties has been laid bare.  As expected, the defendant convincingly argued that the California Court of Appeal has imposed potentially unlimited liability on product

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We have often characterized judicial options as mixed bags, and a recent example of such a mixed bag can be found in Muldoon v. DePuy Orthopaedics, Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 130020 (N.D. Cal. July 23, 2024). The plaintiff claimed injuries from a ceramic-on-metal hip implant.  He alleged that friction and wear caused the

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Decades ago, California had a well-deserved reputation for inventing new varieties of tort liability.  California would hatch an idea to expand liability; law professors would churn out thought-pieces taking the theory in new and further directions; judges across the country would struggle with whether to adopt the concept or constrain it in some fashion; eventually

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Two years ago, in Nexus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Central Admixture Pharmacy Services, Inc., 48 F.4th 1040 (9th Cir. 2022), the Ninth Circuit held that the FDCA impliedly preempts private suits brought under state statutes that “rel[y] on the [FDCA], not traditional state tort law theory,” to define state-law requirements. We were so pleased with

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 Lokkart v. Aziyo Biologics, Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 111265 (C.D. Cal.  May 29, 2024), is yet another case arising from the unfortunate contamination of a batch of tissue allograft with a disease. We have written about similar cases before. These cases have consistently produced favorable precedent concerning state human tissue shield statutes (in