This is the time of year when our thoughts start migrating southward. We can see all those birds’ nests in our suddenly denuded poplar trees. The driveway is a skating rink of damp leaves. The baseboards in our home now gurgle from the operation of an ancient oil heating system.
Over the last two weeks our posts leaned against a pair of intemperate blasts from a Vermont federal court. The results were dreary and/or indecipherable. Thus, it is with some relief that we bask in the warm glow of a nice, straightforward decision from the happiest place on Earth, the federal court in Orlando. In Stanifer v. Corin USA Ltd, Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 158587 (M.D. Fla. Nov. 10, 2014), a hip resurfacing system was implanted into the body of the plaintiff during a right hip arthroplasty procedure. Subsequent failure of the system allegedly caused the plaintiff to suffer a revision left total hip arthroplasty and surgical removal of the system. The plaintiff filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to recover “damages and losses” from the defendants based on state law strict liability claims for breach of warranty, manufacturing defect, and design defect. After removal of the action to federal court, the defendants moved to dismiss the claims based on federal preemption.
The hip system was a class III device, and therefore subject to the PMA process and the attendant federal preemption. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Reigel, a plaintiff injured due to use of a Class III PMA device can escape preemption only by asserting a “parallel” state law claim. As readers of this blog likely know, we think of the parallel claim exception as something crazy and made-up, like a fairy tale or a Johnny Depp movie. Luckily, the Stanifer case is governed by the law of the Eleventh Circuit, a place that knows how to deal with such things. The Stanifer court embraced Eleventh Circuit precedent to the effect that plaintiffs cannot effectively state a “parallel claim” absent allegations that the defendant violated a “particular federal specification.” Ah – we are far from the windy incoherence of Vermont (or Chicago – the Bausch case still stands as the babbling zenith of parallel claim doofus-prudence).
Continue Reading Far from Dumbo: M.D. Fla. Gets “Parallel Claim” Case Right