They say everything is bigger in Texas and when it comes to cowboy boots – they are actually correct. Built by Bob “Daddy-O” Wade in 1979, the largest cowboy boots in the world measure 35 feet tall and 33 feet long and purportedly can hold 300,000 gallons of beer. They stand in front of a
Buckman v. Plaintiffs’ Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001), stands for the proposition that only the federal government may enforce the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and that any state-law claim that depends on the existence of the FDCA is impliedly preempted by 21 U.S.C. § 337(a), which proclaims that all actions to enforce
The Ninth Circuit recently answered a preemption question that we had seen arise intermittently, mostly in food litigation, over the past couple of years. Because the relevant preemption clause closely resembles the language of the Medical Device Amendments, we thought it was worth a look.
In Webb v. Trader Joe’s Co., ___ F.3d ___,
The Ninth Circuit recently answered a preemption question that we had seen arise intermittently, mostly in food litigation, over the past couple of years. Because the relevant preemption clause closely resembles the language of the Medical Device Amendments (“MDA”), we thought it was worth a look.
In Webb v. Trader Joe’s Co., ___ F.3d
Sometimes we write on issues for peculiar reasons. Today, for example, a case on a certain topic caught our eye because of its catchy name: Clark v. Perfect Bar. So many questions arise from this concise, yet provocative tag. Did the owner of the 100-year-old brand Clark Bar get sideways with a modern upstart
Of all the products regulated by the FDA, drugs and medical devices receive the most erratic preemption protection. Thank you, Levine, Lohr, and gibberings about CBEs, clear evidence, and parallel claims. Perhaps it is bad form to accuse SCOTUS of incoherence, but we wouldn’t be the first. (Try reading the SCOTUS doctrinal wanderings
Our last post talked about carbohydrate-rich Thanksgiving food. Today, we are talking about a putative class action on the labeling of certain diet foods, particularly in regard to “net carbs” and sugar alcohols. This was not planned. Colella v. Atkins Nutritionals, Inc., No. 17-cv-5867 (KAM), 2018 WL 6437082 (E.D.N.Y. Dec. 7, 2018), on the
There is a lawyer we worked with at another firm who had a standard move, kind of the way that Jerry Seinfeld had a standard “move” – and, come to think of it, with a similar intention. (“The Move” shows up in “Fusilli Jerry,” the 107th episode of Seinfeld.) In the face or fear of a hostile action against our client, this lawyer would file a declaratory judgment action in a friendly federal court. The concept, of course, was to seize the initiative and do some forum-shopping. Sometimes the action would be preemptive and sometimes it would be reactive. One would think that the timing would make a difference. But as today’s case, Monster Beverage Corp., v. Herrera, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 9012 (9th Cir. May 17, 2016), demonstrates, that ain’t necessarily so. We discussed the Monster case a couple of days after Labor Day in 2013, when Monster survived an attack on its preemptive preemption position. Here it is just a couple of days after Memorial Day in 2016, and the Ninth Circuit has ended the case on grounds of Younger abstention and the Anti-Injunction Act. That’s a long passage of time. The judicial process, especially the appellate phase (doubly so in the Ninth Circuit), can take a while. What happened in the interim?
First, please enjoy this reminder of what the Monster case was about. The San Francisco City Attorney wrote a letter to Monster informing it of an investigation into whether Monster’s marketing of its energy drinks was deceptive and bad in various other ways. Needless to say, the City Attorney’s beef was really with the federal regulatory regime that already governed what Monster could and could not say about its products. But San Francisco has been known to try to conduct its own foreign policy, so why should federal regulations stand in the way of its persistent effort to impose a nanny-state on its benighted citizens? Monster filed a preemptive declaratory judgment action in C.D. Cal. (good idea to drag the San Francisco City Attorney down to SoCal), seeking to shut down the investigation because it was preempted by federal law. Then the San Francisco City Attorney filed a complaint in San Francisco Superior Court, which Monster removed to federal court on grounds of federal question (preemption again), which the federal court remanded after rejecting the preemption argument. For those of you keeping score at home, that means there was a federal case in Dodger-land and a state case in Giant-land.
The San Francisco (honestly, by this point we are tired of writing the city name out in full, but Boranian warned us that we’d be jeered if we abbreviated the city’s name in any way) City Attorney, as is the case with all Bay Area denizens forced to contemplate anything south of Big Sur, must have seen the C.D. Cal. case as a vast annoyance. That was certainly the idea behind Monster’s maneuver. Not surprisingly, then, the City Attorney filed a motion to dismiss the declaratory judgment action in C.D. Cal., arguing that the preemption argument stood no chance. The federal court denied that motion to dismiss. That is the ruling we applauded back in September 2013.Continue Reading San Francisco vs. The Monster (aka Federal Regulation)
It may have been our limited caffeine intake to that point in the day, but, when Bexis asked us to do a post on a case about representations about chicken, our initial thought was of some of the songs sung a la chicken. Like this and this. When we read the decision and saw it was authored by Judge Fischer, we thought about how fishers (the weasel relatives) kill and eat chickens and other “farmed” birds. (They also kill and eat porcupines, which takes rare talent.) At that point, our self-diagnosed mild adult ADD satisfied, we proceeded to read the case. As you would expect if you read the title or had analyzed the trends of when we post about food cases, Arnold v. Kroger Co., No. C-150291, 2016 Ohio App. LEXIS 176 (Ct. App. Ohio Jan. 22, 2016), is not just a case about representations about chicken, it is a case about preemption state law claims based on those representations.
The plaintiffs in Arnold brought purported class action under a variety of Ohio common law and statutory theories based on chicken labeled as “raised in a humane environment” and “humanely raised,” which they said was misleading because the chicken was raised like other mass produced (raised?) chicken. (The chicken was supplied by a non-party company, which used to have television ads proclaiming “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” which could cut for or against the “humane environment” depending on your view.) Title 21 of the United States Code is divided into 27 chapters addressing various things about food and drugs. Chapter 10 is from the Poultry Products Inspection Act (“PPIA,” which you can squawk if you try) and it includes a familiar express preemption provision along with various provisions on inspection, labeling and marketing of poultry. A provision that preempts “marketing, labeling, packaging, or ingredient requirements . . . in addition to, or different than, those [from the PPIA]” should be fairly easy to apply. Id. at **4-5. For private civil actions for damages, the express preemption inquiry starts with the duty that plaintiffs seek to impose under the state law. “Thus, the question here is whether the legal duty upon which each damages action is predicated constitutes an additional or different marketing, labeling, packaging, or ingredient requirement imposed by Ohio.” Id. at *6.Continue Reading Pecking A Blow For Chicken Preemption
Last month, in Quesada v. Herb Thyme Farms, Inc., 361 P.3d 868 (Cal. 2015), the California Supreme Court did to “organic” foods what it had done to most other foods in Farm Raised Salmon Cases, 175 P.3d 1170 (Cal. 2008) – which is to expose them to still more garbage class actions over labeling that complies with federal government standards. As we discussed here, in the Salmon cases the court had to work reasonably hard to come up with an (uncodified) food-related exception to the general ban on private enforcement of the Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act (“FDCA”).
The court had an easier job of it in Quesada because the federal statute that conferred on the Department of Agriculture the power to certify food as “organic” didn’t have a private enforcement provision similar to the FDCA’s 21 U.S.C. §337(a). Rather, “With respect to enforcement, . . . [t]he act contemplates a cooperative state-federal enforcement regime.” 361 P.3d at 871 (citations omitted). See also Id. at 875 (with respect to act’s section on “sanctions for misuse of the organic label,” “nothing in [it] suggests these federal remedies are intended to displace whatever state law remedies might exist”).
So why are we telling you this? We’re not the food blog, after all. Unlike the Salmon decision, this latest addition to food class action mania in California doesn’t even involve the FDCA.Continue Reading California Supreme Court – Presumption Against Preemption Still Around