We were delighted when Jim Dedman of the Abnormal Use blog asked us to help celebrate the twentieth anniversary of My Cousin Vinny. We cannot resist smiling when we think of that movie. 1992 was a big year for some of us – marriage, changing jobs, and buying a house in LA just before
Last night we watched the Academy Awards presentations. We’re never sure why we do this. Why do we care about the film preferences of a notoriously unreliable, insular group whom you might meet at Nate n’ Al’s, but never at Home Depot? Then again, our whole business is built around other peoples’ opinions — judges,
Last week we attended a Mass Torts Forum/Roundtable for Judges and Lawyers in Philadelphia. It was run by Mass Torts Made Perfect (MTMP), an organization created by plaintiff lawyers. We spotted only five defense lawyers at the Forum, surrounded by many, many plaintiff lawyers. And it was perfectly delightful. The plaintiff lawyers were invariably civil
It’s a National Holiday, and we do not expect to do a heckuva lot of work today. There’s a decent college bowl game tonight and our Flyers will be taking on the Hated Rangers in the Winter Classic outdoor hockey game. There’s a bottle of champagne in the fridge that somehow evaded last night’s jackals-masquerading-as-friends.
This is the time of the year when critics and pundits come out with their top (and, sometimes, bottom) ten lists. Bexis will soon recite his most and least favorite court decisions of the year, with his usual withering wit and disproportionate enthusiasm. Some writers have already entered the fray on the mass culture front.
A great Chicagoan, Ernie Banks, was famous for saying “Let’s play two” – an expression of pure joy about the game of baseball. Another great Chicagoan, Judge Richard Posner, recently came out with a pair of opinions that brought us some joy and reminded us of what good legal reasoning and writing looks like. In
Keats called Autumn the “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Fall brings the best weather of the year to the Delaware Valley. Last week was especially fruitful in delivering news of foes in hot water. Our favorite news show, TMZ, ran a piece about most of the nation’s schadenfreude — the German word for
We talk about a lot of law on this blog, but sometimes, we have to admit, the law doesn’t matter, and cases are decided simply on the basis of good lawyering and bad witnesses. Exactly this happened in Zundel v. Johnson & Johnson, No. A-3984-08T1, slip op. (N.J. Super App. Div. Aug. 5, 2011) (unpublished). In Zundel, the jury – and then the appellate court – found for the defense because, essentially, the other side’s witnesses were exposed as liars.
Zundel involved bad injuries, no doubt about it. Stevens-Johnson syndrome – especially the worst kind, toxic epidural necrosis – basically makes your skin fall off, as if burnt. Zundel, slip op. at 4-5. The other side has created a cottage industry taking what are essentially rare idiosyncratic reactions (id. at 5 – TEN incidence is at most one in a million) to almost any drug (and maybe other foreign substances as well) and turning them into failure to warn cases. In order to avoid the learned intermediary rule, among other reasons, the other side prefers to target over-the-counter products in SJS/TEN cases.
That has its advantages, but there are disadvantages also. Disinterested doctors are more likely to be credible witnesses than plaintiffs and their family members, who testify with dollar signs in their eyes. That’s what happened in Zundel.
Once the unfortunate minor plaintiff suffered (and we on the defense side don’t use the word “suffered” lightly) from SJS/TEN, the family, with legal assistance, went looking for some medication to target. Motrin was the target of choice.
One slight little problem cropped up as the case proceeded, however.
It turned out that the plaintiffs’ aim was bad – really bad. How bad? Well, the minor plaintiff didn’t start taking Motrin until after already exhibiting the first symptoms of SJS/TEN:
The record shows that [minor plaintiff] was afflicted with TEN on January 5, 1998, when she was first examined by [treating physician] and before she was given Children’s Motrin by her mother.
Slip op. at 12 (emphasis added).Continue Reading Sometimes, The Law Doesn’t Matter
We just read Scharff v. Wyeth, 2011 U.S. Dist. Lexis 85132 (M.D. Ala. Aug. 2, 2011). Substantively, it’s all about the application of the statute of limitations, and we don’t usually blog about statute of limitations issues (except class action tolling, which Scharff did not address) due to their fact-bound and state-specific nature.
In
Don’t you always feel a surge of patriotism when you return to the United States? Even if the trip abroad was wonderful in every way, and even if the immigration and customs lines are horrific, it’s great to be back.
We feel that way now, after spending a good deal of the last couple of