We are feeling happy and grateful this week. On Sunday, we were able to hug the Drug and Device Law Dowager Countess for the first time in fourteen months and to share a Mothers’ Day meal with her and our siblings, all fully vaccinated and past the waiting period. The Countess is closer to 90
None of us are perfect. Briefs get filed with typos. Letters go out mis-dated. It happens. Emailing and texting are prone to informality, abbreviations, and let’s face it, bad grammar, that should be guarded against creeping into professional writing. Above all else, there is the potential pitfall of the “cut and paste.” Afterall, who wants
We hope, when our time on earth is up, we are remembered as someone who possessed skills and made contributions. We are certain that gardening will not be among them. In that vein, we recently hired professionals to plant a lovely new bed at the end of our driveway. We were admonished that we must
Yesterday afternoon, only a few minutes after we saw the storm warning and cut short our walk with the Drug and Device Law Little Rescue Dogs, a brief but violent thunderstorm crashed through our neighborhood in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. (We note, parenthetically, that the adjective “violent” describes our weather with unprecedented and escalating
We are certain that profound revelations – scientific, economic, and political – will arise from the Covid-19 crisis. For now, we comment on bits of knowledge we have gained so far. We have learned, spending 24 hours each day with our dogs, that they bark 20 hours each day. We have learned that the concept
The recent spate of gadolinium cases brought by patients with normal kidney function are looking like fertile ground for federal preemption, and we are not saying that just because we like the results. Our point is that if you had to come up with an example of a case where federal law ought to preempt
Diversity jurisdiction has been on our minds a lot lately. Last week, we wrote about a plaintiff who unsuccessfully tried to steer under the $75,000 amount in controversy requirement. As John Adams said, “facts are stubborn things,” and the existence of medical bills in excess of $75,000 refuted the plaintiff’s remand motion and permitted the
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
It may be post Mardi Gras season, but we don’t think there is ever a bad time to embrace the motto – “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” Quite literally – “Let the good times roll.” However, don’t try this with your high school French
This post is from the non-Reed Smith side of the blog.
Search for Medtronic on this blog and you’re going to find preemption cases. Lots of preemption cases. Mostly preemption victories for the defense. An overwhelming body of preemption law has been made by Medtronic. They’ve certainly led the charge. So, if we say today’s
As our post-Levine preemption cheat sheet demonstrates, Mensing/Bartlett preemption is breathing down the necks of all prescription drug design defect claims. Recent cases finding preemption of design defect claims due to the need for FDA pre-approval of “major” or “moderate” design changes (basically, anything that could be causal in a product liability