Tonight, with great pleasure, we will hand out candy to tiny costumed neighbors – the three- and five-year-olds from across the street, who call us “Miss Rachel,” and the seven- and 10-year-olds from next door, who come over daily to play with the new puppy, among others. (Not too many others, we fear – we
California state court is not the place most products liability defendants want to end up. Unfortunately, today’s case had to stay in state court because plaintiff sued the defendant’s device representatives who had direct contact with the plaintiff. The reps, like plaintiff, were California residents and destroyed diversity jurisdiction. The decision, however, in James v.
Okay, retail shelves don’t have eyes. We coined that phrase to mimic the title of the Wes Craven films featuring desert mutants and the horror they impose on unsuspecting travelers. We watched the original 1977 film The Hills Have Eyes while traveling a few years back and thought it was not that great. Imagine then
We are trying very hard not to bore everyone silly with endless discussion of our puppy-to-be, almost certainly interesting only to us. But we are failing. So, briefly, we comment that we met the whole spectacular litter last week – eight gorgeous butterballs. Five are white, and three are now black but will probably end
It has been just about two years since the Central District of California dismissed the claims in Nexus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Central Admixture Pharmacy Services, Inc. as impermissible attempts to privately enforce the FDCA and therefore impliedly preempted. We blogged about that decision back then. At that time, we noted that while the case arose
Two weeks ago we reported on a case that refused to apply offensive non-mutual collateral estoppel, the doctrine that prevents a defendant from relitigating an issue that it lost in earlier litigation against a different plaintiff. Although we weren’t impressed by that decision’s analysis, its outcome was one we could endorse. Today we report on
They say the smartest people are the ones who are always learning something new. Those who are open to new ideas and concepts. People who are eager to acquire new information. That’s a great way to live. Long live enlightenment. However, when it comes to federal preemption of a failure to warn claim involving a
Since the Supreme Court decided Bruesewitz v. Wyeth LLC, 562 U.S. 223 (2011), product liability litigation over childhood vaccines is rare but not extinct. As demonstrated by today’s case — Garcia v. Sanofi Pasteur Inc., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 134330 (E.D. Cal. Jul. 28, 2022). And while the decision does discuss preemption, this
Whaley v. Merck & Co., 2022 WL 1153151 (S.D. Cal. April 12, 2022), is an ugly example of overly grasping personal jurisdiction permitted in the service of facilitating an even worse overreach by a state’s substantive law. We’ve repeatedly criticized the substantive theory – innovator liability – because (among other things) it exposes manufacturers to liability for claimed defects in competing generic drugs from which the defendants received no benefit (quite the opposite), and did not control what their competitors did. Indeed, innovator liability strays so far from traditional product liability that it creates personal jurisdictional problems – since the target defendant often has no jurisdictional contacts whatever with the forum state, since it didn’t even sell the product that allegedly caused (very attenuated) harm.
Continue Reading California Court Overreaches on Personal Jurisdiction
California’s courts have never met a case they did not like. Or, more precisely, they have never met a case over which they would not exercise jurisdiction if arguably supported by the facts, and even when not supported by the facts. We are exaggerating, of course, but not by much. You will recall that the