The Pennsylvania Supreme Court recently decided Walsh v. BASF Corp., ___ A.3d ___, 2020 WL 4135151 (Pa. July 21, 2020), reaffirming product identification as an essential element of product liability.
Below, the Superior Court had turned a trial court’s routine Fryebert-like exclusion ruling in a chemical exposure case into scary new precedent in
Happy birthday, Hans Mattson. Did you, dear reader, forget? No worries. Mattson was born in Sweden in 1832, played a key role in Swedish settlement in Minnesota, served in the U.S. Civil War, and was consul to India. It’s been a long time since he blew out any candles, so your oversight will offend nobody.
All of us – defense lawyers, plaintiff lawyers, and judges – tend to assume that the federal Daubert standard for admissibility of expert testimony is more rigorous than competing standards, particularly the Frye standard, which lingers in a minority of jurisdictions (and not even where it originated). In simple terms, Frye merely asks whether the