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Nerds such as your friendly neighborhood DDL bloggers read legal decisions with excitement. We hardly seem alone in that regard, at least lately. Over the past several weeks, SCOTUS issued a series of major opinions on wedge issues, engendering widespread feelings of triumph or despair or exultation or fury. The “least dangerous branch” looks plenty

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“You should’ve made a better medicine sooner” sounds like a complaint, but not a legal complaint. The FDA approves drugs if they are safe and effective; they needn’t be the best possible on the fastest schedule. If best-and-fastest were the criteria, the drug approval process would be crazy, sloppy, and frantic. Or maybe it would

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The SCOTUS decision in the Wyeth v. Levine case created much mischief in the field of preemption. The Court’s sloppy overstatement of the significance and availability of the Changes Being Effected (CBE) process breathed new life into prescription drug failure to warn cases that should have been safely interred at the pleadings stage. As bad

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The drive from our home to the Delaware courthouse takes no more time than the drive to the Philly courthouse. But those two courthouses are worlds apart. The Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas is plaintiffs’ heaven. Most judges there think everything should go to a jury, and most jurors there think heaps of money should

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Lyons v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2020 WL 5835125 (N.D. Ga. Sept. 29, 2020), was a wrongful death action alleging that the anticoagulant drug Pradaxa was defective and not accompanied by adequate warnings that blood plasma concentrations should be monitored and that certain patient characteristics, such as age, renal impairments, and concomitant statin

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The order of operations can matter.  Back in elementary school, you may have learned a mnemonic about somebody’s aunt to help you remember the right order for doing certain math problems.  In computer programming, engineering, auto repair, surgery, and a myriad of other endeavors, you can get very different results if you take the same

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The Covid-19 lockdown period is approaching the six-month mark, from mid-March to mid-September. Throughout the spring and summer we have been reading old novels with convoluted plots and surprise endings. Today we take a look at an old case, though only from a prior decade, not a prior century. If the case is convoluted, it