Happy Star Wars Day. May the Fourth be with you.
If all FDA approved medicines enjoyed the preemption protection that vaccines do, the DDL product liability litigation landscape would be leaner and less nonsensical. Flores v. Merck & Co., 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46442 (D. Nev. March 16, 2022), shows why that is so.
A post-sale duty to warn is almost oxymoronic. If you think about a typical warnings case, the focus is on whether the manufacturer/seller had notice of a potential risk before the product left its control (or prescribed to the plaintiff), and if so, whether that risk was adequately conveyed to the plaintiff. The question we
Talk to any realtor and they’ll tell you location is the key to any home search. And normally when we rail against litigation tourists, location is pretty key to us too. Plaintiffs can’t forum shop for “judicial hellholes” that have no relation to them or to the defendant. So, you’ve probably heard us say plaintiffs
The United States Supreme Court in Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001), determined that “off-label usage” is “accepted and necessary” by both the FDA and the medical community. Id. at 350. Thus, “[p]hysicians may prescribe drugs and devices for off-label uses.” Id. at 351 n.5 (citation and quotation marks omitted).
Plaintiffs tend to assert a bunch of different claims. For prescription medical device cases, setting aside preemption, our experience is that plaintiffs do best—that is, avoid summary judgment and directed verdict—with design defect (strict liability or negligence) claims. One reason for that is that it tends not to be hard to make up some theory,
I can make a hat, a brooch, or a pterodactyl. Of course, that’s a famous line from the movie Airplane! But, it seems to have taken on a new meaning now that we aren’t out and about like we use to be. After work, weekends, before work, lunch hour. All of these used to be
We all know that absent extraordinary circumstances, failure to warn claims against generic drug manufacturers are preempted under PLIVA, Inc. v. Mensing, 564 U.S. 604 (2011). But as far as we are aware, no other court has been asked to decide whether that same preemption applies to cross-claims for contribution or indemnity. Until now.
Today’s guest post is by Reed Smith‘s Jenn Eppensteiner. In it she discusses a recurring theme on the Blog – claimed product “defects” arising from nothing more than the failure of an implanted medical device. Case after case has recognized that the human body is a hostile environment for implants, surrounded by the
We are back in the trenches today after spending a wonderful day in New York with our lifelong best friend, in yet another of the blissfully endless celebrations of the milestone birthday we marked in December. We saw “The Band’s Visit,” a new musical based on a 2007 movie about eight members of an Egyptian
Happy birthday, Louise Fletcher, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of the sadistic Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Happy birthday also to Albert Brooks, writer/director/star of Modern Romance (1981), Lost in America (1985), Defending Your Life (1991), and a gaggle of other comedies. Brooks also did fine work as an actor in several non-comedies, such as Taxi Driver (1976), Broadcast News (1987), and Drive (2011). But for our money, his best performance is in Out of Sight (1998), where Brooks played a Michael Milken-esque financier-turned-prison-inmate. By the way, Brooks’ birth name was Albert Einstein. Brooks changed his name for obvious reasons. He cracked that the great physicist had changed his name to Albert Einstein simply to sound smart. Finally, happy birthday to Don Henley of The Eagles. Henley sang and co-wrote “Hotel California” (1977), an allegory about SoCal showbiz excess. The best line in the song is “We are all just prisoners here of our own device.”
Does that trio of birthdays suggest a theme? Indeed, it does: drugs and prisoners. Today’s case is Flowers v. Eli Lilly & Co., 2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS (D. Nevada July 10, 2015), in which a pro se plaintiff prisoner claimed that Zyprexa gave him diabetes. The plaintiff had been prescribed Zyprexa at the beginning of his incarceration in 1997, went off it in 2003, and then back on it in 2009, continuing up through the filing of the lawsuit in 2014. The plaintiff was diagnosed with diabetes in November 2012. After learning of the diagnosis, the plaintiff requested that he be taken off Zyprexa. The request was denied. Remember, the plaintiff was a prisoner. Patient choice seldom matters from a legal point of view in these cases (because of the learned intermediary doctrine, discussed below), but in this case it really, really does not matter. Zyprexa is an antipsychotic drug that can be used to treat very serious conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The court’s opinion does not tell us why the prison wanted the plaintiff to be on an antipsychotic, but odds are there was a very good reason.