Every law student learns the same tidy hierarchy on day one of Torts. Negligence is harder to prove than strict liability, because strict liability does not require showing the defendant did anything wrong, only that the product itself was defective. And recklessness is harder still than negligence, reserved for conduct that goes well beyond a
Every sport has that one venue where the home team gets every close call. Fenway in the late 2010s. Lambeau Field in a January snowstorm. Or, if you are a Baltimore Orioles fan — Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, where a twelve-year-old kid with a glove reached over
Here’s a pop quiz. You’re a nurse. You’ve just used an insulin pen on Patient A. Do you: (a) use the same pen on Patient B or (b) grab Patient B’s own pen? If you picked (a), please put down the syringe, because you have apparently never heard of a little thing called the germ
There’s a certain romance to the idea that if one courthouse door closes, another—perhaps with better lighting and more favorable precedent—must surely be open somewhere else. But as one group of particularly determined preemption refugees recently learned, civil procedure is not a game of judicial Whac-A-Mole.
The story begins in Utah, where 50 plaintiffs brought
Add Connecticut to the list of Zantac multi-plaintiff losses, following the Florida multidistrict litigation (our “Zantac Chronicles” series of posts, and the Delaware Supreme Court). Only this time the several hundred Connecticut plaintiffs that were dismissed never even reached the absurd causation allegations that doomed the MDL and Delaware cases. Rather, these Connecticut plaintiffs didn’t even have a means to establish personal jurisdiction over the non-Connecticut defendants they sued. Bacher v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2025 WL 2463143 (Conn. Super. Aug. 22, 2025).
Continue Reading Hundreds of Non-Resident Zantac Plaintiffs Run Out of Connecticut
Happy New Year. We are doing that usual January/Janus thing of looking both backwards and forwards. We are gearing up for a massive litigation in 2025, for a couple of trials, and for the January 16 Drug and Device Law webinar on the best and worst cases of 2024. And we’re still finding some 2024
Plaintiffs naming local sales representatives—or doctors, or pharmacies, or distributors, or retailers—as defendants to try to destroy diversity and avoid federal court is nothing new. Unfortunately, defendants bear a “heavy burden” proving fraudulently joinder. In fact, our last post on the topic was in February 2023, demonstrating that successes on this issue are few
Whoever said “you get what you pay for” never deposed a plaintiff expert. Most plaintiff experts we’ve encountered acquired their expertise – if that’s what you want to call it – not in any substantive area but, rather, in slinging junk science hash at juries with a straight, and maybe even solemn, face. As if
Without detouring into a larger discussion on the impacts of humans on the environment and our fellow animals, we can say that we are big fans of the other extant great apes. Our puppy’s fascination with nature documentaries has helped pique that interest of late. Our gingery cousin the orangutan, the largest primarily arboreal mammal
We are back “stateside,” after a trip to London and Florence. We loved both, especially the Tower of London, Highclere Castle (used for the filming of Downton Abbey – how very cool to walk through the rooms we watched with such pleasure for six seasons) and, of course, the breathtaking David. But this is pretty