This Wednesday evening marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. In every other year, our large extended family has gathered for Seder, a ritual dinner that commemorates, with traditional foods, songs, and prayers, the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. In our family, Seder is a beloved (and occasionally raucous)
Last week with dismay, we described the Eastern District of Pennsylvania’s decision in Gross v. Coloplast Corp., et al., 2020 WL 264691 (E.D. Pa. Jan. 17, 2020). The Gross court (we are resisting the immature cheap shot) “predicted,” in the face of decades of contrary evidence, that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would not extend
We would be remiss (and out of character) if we plunged into a discussion of today’s case without a shout-out to “Siba,” the gorgeous black Standard Poodle who won Best in Show at last week’s Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. Regular readers of this blog may recall that we attend Westminster every year and that
The opinion, Schrecengost v. Coloplast Corp., 2019 WL 6465398 (W.D. Pa. Dec. 2, 2019), recently “predicted” that Pennsylvania would allow strict liability design and warning defect claims in cases involving prescription medical products. Id. at *11-13. In so doing Schrecengost was not only wrong, but loud wrong. First, without even a serious discussion, Schrecengost
We had been waiting for the Utah Supreme Court’s decision in Burningham v. Wright Medical for some time. As we pointed out in a blogpost when Burningham was first certified by the district court (Utah is one of the few courts allowing district court certification), over a year ago, “[p]ractically no court has . .
First, we’ve endured MDL courts messing around with Utah law and ignoring the usual congruence in the treatment of prescription drugs and prescription medical devices under Restatement (Second) of Torts §402A, comment k (1965). We covered that kerfuffle here, here, here, and here. More recently, the Fifth Circuit in In re
Strict liability is not the same as absolute liability. We learned that truth in law school, but too many plaintiff lawyers and judges seem to have unlearned it along the way. The key separator between strict liability and absolute liability is comment k to section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts (1965), which observes
We have a guest post today, from Luther Munford of Butler Snow. He’s been doing some thinking about how something analogous to the “two schools of thought” medical malpractice doctrine should apply to medical product liability cases. As always with out guest posts, our posters deserve 100% of the credit, and any blame, for
When it comes to design defect claims and FDA pre-market approved (“PMA”) medical devices, “preemption” is our reflexive reaction. That’s entirely reasonable, given the many decisions that preempt state-law design-related claims since Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., 552 U.S. 312 (2008). We collect then all here.
Nevertheless, there are some judges, particularly (but not
About two years ago, in our post “How Does a Bad Idea Get Implanted,” we discussed what at the time seemed a California peculiar argument that the “unavoidably unsafe” product doctrine epitomized by Restatement (Second) of Torts §402A, comment k (1965) was somehow limited to implantable – as opposed to non-implantable – medical