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
Long ago, when we first started representing the makers of prescription pharmaceuticals, it was said that people did not tend to sue over life-saving medications. Contraceptives, pain medications, obesity medications, diabetes medications, psychiatric medications, and many others were fair game, even if the risk-benefit calculus for an individual patient might involve major benefits on one
Back in the Pleistocene era when we toiled in law school, it seemed as if modern tort law developed as the result of a cross-continental game of ping pong played between the California and New Jersey courts. That still seems to be the case. Sure, there is the occasional, horrific verdict in flyover country that
We are not surprised that some readers dissented from our judgment last week that the Billions series is trash, albeit fun trash. We should be accustomed to this sort of thing. Friends constantly pepper us with praise for allegedly realistic depictions of our business. It used to be predominantly about Law and Order, but
It’s a short work week, and we’ve got a short case for today’s discussion. Ebrahimi v. Mentor Worldwide LLC, 2020 WL 2510760 (9th Cir. May 12, 2020), eats up only one page when we set our printer to double-sided (which we always do now, since the pandemic work-at-home routine gobbles up paper and ink
Truly unique cases are, well, unique. Most cases involve variations or combinations of cases we have seen before. Sometimes you get different results between two decisions on basically the same case with a single fact different. In February, we posted on an Eastern District of Pennsylvania decision on a motion to dismiss in a case
If we were to recap briefly our reactions to the Levine decision and ten years of decisions attempting to apply it, then we might say something like this. The Court’s creation of a clear evidence standard for conflict preemption in the context of warnings claims for branded drugs was both novel and misguided. The Court
We would be hard pressed to think of a recent judicial decision we have blasted as hard or often as the Third Circuit’s Fosamax opinion. We deemed it the worst case of 2017. It was bad enough that our hometown federal appellate court held that it was up to a jury whether the FDA
The toughest thing about defending product liability cases is the occasional immersion in human misery. Securities and antitrust cases pose intellectual challenges but they are, in the end, pretty much about money. By contrast, the plaintiffs in our cases are claiming injuries to their bodies, not just their wallets. Sometimes those alleged injuries are phony
Recently Rudy Giuliani was broiled for saying that the truth isn’t the truth. Denying a tautology won’t typically earn one high marks for logic. Add in the callback to Pontius Pilate’s “What is truth” question, and it sounds like bad epistemology in service of bad morality. But we’re not here to talk politics. Nor are