As we discussed in our recent 50-state survey on failure-to-report claims, plaintiff-side allegations seeking to predicate “warning” liability on a defendant’s allegedly failing to comply with FDCA adverse event reporting claims are “relatively new.” That’s because, like so many other novel claims we’ve seen lately, it’s a transparent dodge to avoid preemption. We said
Connecticut
Guest Post – Plaintiff’s Pyrrhic Pradaxa Victory Vanquished

Today we have another guest post from friend-of-the-Blog, Dick Dean at Tucker Ellis. He’s familiar with the ongoing Pradaxa litigation and is pleased with the preemption pummeling Pradaxa plaintiffs have been receiving. Here’s his post about yet another favorable decision from the state-court Pradaxa proceedings in Connecticut. With decisions like this, who needs snap…
The Other Independence Principle In Preemption

A great woman once said “When they go low, we go high.” Apropos of nothing in particular these days, we have been thinking about the issue of tone recently. For instance, what is the exact line between a negative political advertisement and a positive one? Are there circumstances where a candidate might suspend negative ads…
Post-Albrecht Preemption Persistently Pummels Pradaxa Plaintiffs

Not long ago, in our “Post-Albrecht Preemption Pummels Pradaxa Plaintiffs” post we discussed several recent favorable preemption decisions in product liability litigation involving that drug: Ridings v. Maurice, ___ F. Supp.3d ___, 2020 WL 1264178 (Mag. W.D. Mo. March 16, 2020), Adkins v. Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 2020 WL 1704646 (Conn.…
Plaintiff’s Pyrrhic Pradaxa “Victory”

Various plaintiff-side consortia have taken it into their heads to sue every manufacturer of so-called “novel oral anticoagulants” because these products, gasp, can cause serious, and sometime fatal, bleeding incidents. Fortunately, on the whole the plaintiffs haven’t done so well with these cases – losing almost all the trials – because jurors can be taught…
No Expert, No Diluted Warning, No Case
Statute of Limitations in the Context of Prescription Drug Addiction: Case Dismissed in Northern District of New York

This weekend, we are traveling to Nashville, where, decades ago, we lived for a couple of years during a period of wanderlust. Nashville was to be a brief stop-off on a cross-country driving odyssey. But we never got any farther down the road, leaving Nashville only to reverse course and return to college (to our…
A Stroll Down Innovator Liability Memory Lane Results In Dismissals

Since Conte in 2008, we have not made a secret of our view that innovator liability is a bad idea, contrary to traditional tort law principles and to sound public policy. We, especially Bexis, may even be accused of being somewhat obsessed with chronicling the decisions, big and small, on this issue over close to…
A Seminal Decision on Duties, Warnings, and Learned Intermediaries

When we were on a jury last month we were warned not to consult any outside sources. And we didn’t. When we were in high school last century and studied the works of Eliot, Lawrence, Joyce, Waugh, and (another) Eliot, we were instructed not to consider extraneous issues, such as biography or social conditions. Our …
As If Discovery Were Not Difficult Enough, Now This

When Congress enacted HIPAA and its Privacy Rule in the mid-1990s, it was a big deal. Healthcare providers surely protected patient privacy in the pre-HIPAA days, but the federal statute gave them a standard set of rules with which to comply and a uniform referent against which to gauge their privacy practices. All told, HIPAA’s…