We say today’s case is about SIRVA (shoulder injury related to vaccine administration), but plaintiff tried her best to run from that allegation in her opposition to defendants’ motion to dismiss. That’s because a SIRVA case runs up against not only a preemption obstacle, but also serious duty and causation barriers. But since the court
Plaintiff in Gurule v. Boston Scientific Corp., 2023 Cal. Super. LEXIS 49321 (Cal. Super. Jul. 18, 2023), tried to pull off a little magic through misdirection, but couldn’t fool the court. Plaintiff tried to distract the court from the complete lack of sufficient allegations to satisfy even notice pleading requirements by alleging an elaborate
We do not often see state court opinions strongly endorsing federal preemption, or even weakly endorsing federal preemption. That is why we took notice last week when the California Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Medicare Act expressly preempted state common-law and statutory claims against a health maintenance organization and a healthcare plan administrator. Most
We start with the usual poodle report – actually with a comment that these may be drawing to a close, as Luca is only a few points from finishing his championship and coming home. We suspect this will cause little grief for readers of this blog (the Drug and Device Law Rock Climber and other
Last year, the federal court decision to exclude plaintiffs’ general causation expert in the In re: Onglyza and Kombiglyze XR Products Liability Litigation, MDL 2809 (E.D. Ken.),took a spot in our top ten best of 2022 (original post on that decision here). Without a general causation expert, it is not surprising that summary judgement
When we last visited the Zostavax MDL last December, over a thousand plaintiffs, all claiming shingles as an injury, had been dismissed because none of them could produce results from the only medical test that could establish causation. We ended that post with:
The only claims left allege that Zostavax caused a hodge-podge of other injuries. But it’s safe to say the nucleus of this MDL pretty much self-destructed.
We reported nearly two years ago on a California trial court that dismissed claims against generic over-the-counter drug manufacturers under California’s notorious Proposition 65, on the basis that federal law preempted those claims. You can read that post here, and you will see that we said at the end that an appeal was likely.
We have decided that 2023 will be a year of new adventures for us. We are dipping our toes into the world of dog shows (our gorgeous poodle puppy is now past five months old and soon to begin his show career with a top poodle handler) and we are running for local elected office.
For many years, the “one-two punch” was our affectionate label for post-Mensing cases that prevent innovator liability and preempt generic liability. But it’s been several years since we’ve used the expression this way because it was so effective in knocking out those cases, we just aren’t seeing them like we used to.
Almost a year ago we wrote a post called Learned Intermediary – Not Just for Failure to Warn about a California putative economic loss class action that was dismissed for failing to plead any allegations about whether the drug manufacturer had adequately warned plaintiff’s prescribing physician. Fast forward about 9 months and we posted about
