Here’s more news from the academy that you might find to be useful:
First, Professors Kevin Clermont (Cornell) and Stephen Yeazell (UCLA) level both barrels at two of our favorite cases, Bell Atlantic v. Twombly and Iqbal v. Ashcroft. The “point of th[eir] Article is that wherever you stand on pleading — even if
This just in:
(Actually, it came in late yesterday, but we were first busy and then tired. Sorry.)
In April 2008, the FDA recalled all lots of the drug Digitek (distributed by Mylan and UDL Laboratories), because the tablets may have contained too much of the drug’s active ingredient, exposing certain patients to risk.
First
The two of us have been practicing law now for a little over 25 years. Bexis graduated law school in 1982 and Herrmann a year later (see our bios – links at the top – for the gory details). At big firms it takes a few years – five at least – before we could
On the one hand, we love Judge Jack Weinstein.
He’s a distinguished scholar, an impassioned advocate for social reform, and a historic figure in the law.
On the other hand, sometimes he scares the bejeesus out of us.
We just finished reading, for example, his “Preliminary Reflections on Administration of Complex Litigation” in the inaugural
Trans-substantivism.
That’s the notion that we should have one set of procedural rules that applies equally to all substantive areas of the law. It’s a cornerstone assumption of modern American procedure. In the federal system, we call our trans-substantive rules — which apply equally to slip-and-falls, massive securities fraud cases, and everything in between —
We reported last week that Judge Anne Conway, who’s overseeing the Seroquel MDL, had granted summary judgment in favor of AstraZeneca in the bellwether cases involving the first two plaintiffs. She had not yet issued her written decision at that time.
She still hasn’t entered that written decision. (We just couldn’t leave you hanging there.)
We enjoyed John Beisner and Jessica Miller’s paper, “Litigate the Torts, Not the Mass: A Modest Proposal for Reforming How Mass Torts are Adjudicated,” just published by the Washington Legal Foundation. (We liked Richard Nagareda’s foreword to the monograph, too. And we’re pleased to see that the authors are giving a talk based on their
Last month, a regular reader of this blog suggested that we publish a post giving drug and device companies some pre-litigation counseling. What, our reader asked, should companies do to minimize the risk that they become embroiled in a mass tort?
Ha!
There’s an old political cartoon, maybe from The New Yorker, where a man
We haven’t yet read this one, but we like the sound of it.
Byron Stier, of Southwestern Law School, has posted at SSRN his manuscript, “Another Jackpot (In)Justice: Verdict Variability and Issue Preclusion in Mass Torts.” Here’s what the abstract tells us:
“If there are no prior inconsistent verdicts, non-mutual offensive issue preclusion generally allows
We have no creativity.
Professor Lester Brickman, of Cardozo School of Law, posted on SSRN his article about mass torts. Brickman asks a provocative question in his title: “The Use of Litigation Screenings in Mass Torts: A Formula for Fraud?”
If we were answering that question, we would have just written: “Yes.”
But that wouldn’t