At the end of the term, the Supreme Court, in Ruan v. United States, 2022 WL 2295024,142 S. Ct. 2370 (2022), vacated the convictions of a couple of alleged “pill mill” doctors under the Controlled Substances Act upon finding that the government’s proof in their criminal trial did not meet the standard required
Supreme Court
Supreme Court Curtails Plaintiffs’ Ability To Avoid Repaying Medicaid
Although it is not a drug/device case (if it were, we would have discussed it before now), the recent Supreme Court decision in Gallardo v. Marstiller, 142 S. Ct. 1751 (2022), raises some interesting issues that attorneys defending personal injury action of any sort should consider. Settlement of any personal injury case involving a…
Sign, Sign, Everywhere A Sign . . . Can’t You Read The Sign?
This past weekend, there was an NCAA Division I clash of athletic teams ranked #5 and #7, respectively, that included two children of two different authors of this Blog. To make things even weirder, one athlete is (cisgender) female and one athlete is (cisgender) male, and they come from opposite ends of the country, although…
Supreme Court To Decide General Jurisdiction By Consent
Yesterday the Supreme Court granted plaintiff’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern Railway Co. – a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case holding that registering to do business in a state does not by itself subject a corporation to general jurisdiction in that state. 266 A.3d 541 (Pa. 2021), discussed here.…
Supreme Court Halts OSHA Mandatory Large Employer Vaccination Mandate
Using its increasingly notorious “shadow docket,” the United States Supreme Court recently stayed operation of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”) had imposed on large (more than 100 employees) employers nationwide. See National Federation of Independent Businesses v. OSHA, ___ S. Ct. ___, 2022 WL 120952…
Is Something Fishy Going On?
Back in the early days of the blog, when it was a Bexis/Herrmann operation, we wrote about the California Supreme Court decision that opened the floodgates to all that food litigation that now plagues that state − Farm Raised Salmon Cases, 175 P.3d 1170 (Cal. 2008). We explained how the court In Farm Raised …
Multi-Plaintiff Trial Issue at the Supreme Court
We’ve griped about multi-plaintiff consolidated trials for years on this blog, both generally, and in the specific context of prescription medical product liability litigation. Now the issue is before the Supreme Court in one of the most grotesque miscarriages of justice that we’ve seen – and several of us practice in Philadelphia – a…
Possibly Off-the-Wall Ideas Triggered by Recent Cases
One of the intriguing things about cases decided by a jurisdiction’s highest court is that pronouncements by such courts can often have far-reaching implications. Sometimes they pan out, as the application of the First Amendment to the FDA’s ban on off-label promotion seems to be doing following Sorrell v. IMS Health, Inc., 564 U.S.…
Something Interesting We Didn’t Know
Sometimes we get an opinion back from a court, and the reasoning leaves us scratching our heads and wondering, “Where did that come from?” In the opinion, the court has decided the case on something that neither party ever argued. We blogged about a case like that once, here. In that case at least,…
Ford Personal Jurisdiction Case Decided – In-State Plaintiffs Win; Forum Shoppers Lose
We’ve blogged about the United States Supreme Court’s pending personal jurisdiction cases before. Well, they pend no longer. Yesterday the Court unanimously (with a couple of concurrences) ruled that resident plaintiffs injured by products originally manufactured and sold elsewhere could sue a nationwide company like Ford – that “purposefully avail[ed] itself of the privilege…