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We scratched our heads last year when the Third Circuit misconstrued the federal PREP Act to allow a state-law negligence claim arising from an alleged COVID-related death, in direct contravention of the Act’s express preemption.  See Maglioli v. Alliance HC Holdings LLC, 16 F. 4th 393 (3d Cir. 2021).  The other shoe dropped the

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There has been a veritable pandemic of posts about Covid-19 regulations (vaccine mandates, restrictions on indoor gatherings, etc.) on the DDL blog as of late, so we thought we’d take a break from the craziness and report on a good, old-fashioned medical device preemption case. And yet we still found ourselves encountering a loathsome disease

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The plaintiff in Vesoulis v. Reshape Lifesciences, 2021 WL 1909725 (E.D. Louisiana May 12, 2021), was a dentist. So if he was complaining about pain and suffering, we’d step back and take notice. (Think of the Steve Martin song from the Little Shop of Horrors musical film.) The plaintiff certainly did have something

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This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.

This blog has repeatedly lamented the tendency of MDL courts to flout federal pleading standards when assessing the sufficiency of master complaints. All too often MDL courts disregard Rule 8(a), which—as authoritatively interpreted by the Supreme Court in Twombly and Iqbal—requires plaintiffs to

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Ray Charles’s musical threat of “tell your Ma, tell your Pa, gonna send you back to Arkansas” doesn’t sound so bad to us after reading Green v. Bayer Corp., 2021 WL 687024 (E.D. Ark. Feb. 22, 2021). The plaintiff alleged injuries from a permanent contraceptive device and brought claims for negligent training, negligent risk

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Could a tax case ever make for interesting reading? To our surprise, the answer is Yes. In our end-of-year excavation of older cases we missed when they first came out, we unearthed Rowitz v. Tax Commissioner of Ohio, 2019 WL 7489061 (Ohio Ct. App. Dec. 31, 2019). The plaintiffs in that case applied for