An unexpected bit of good news as we go into November. Bexis will be presenting at the Reed Smith annual client CLE program on big-deal pending cases. In preparation, he took a look at the SCOTUSBlog page for Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, No 17-290 (that’s the Supreme Court name for In
We would be hard pressed to think of a recent judicial decision we have blasted as hard or often as the Third Circuit’s Fosamax opinion. We deemed it the worst case of 2017. It was bad enough that our hometown federal appellate court held that it was up to a jury whether the FDA
Nothing emphasizes the impermanence of just about everything as Hawaii – where Bexis is right now on vacation. On Kauai, Bexis had a boat drop scheduled to Kalalalu Beach, for three days on the Kalalau Trail, all permits obtained. But several months ago, the heavens opened, and the Na Pali Coast received
When Justice Gorsuch was first nominated for the Supreme Court, we took a look at his preemption decisions and were favorably impressed. We’re doing the same thing today with respect to the new nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Our job today
Today, on the last day of the United States Supreme Court’s 2018 Term, the Court issued an order granting review (“certiorari”) in Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Albrecht, No. 17-290 – which is the Supreme Court docket name for the defendant’s appeal from the horrible preemption decision (our worst case of the year
We immediately called for the further appeal and reversal of the hideous decision in In re Fosamax (Alendronate Sodium) Products Liability Litigation, 852 F.3d 268 (3d Cir. 2017). However, we’re just bloggers. Thus, we were greatly pleased when the United States Supreme Court, on December 8, 2017, requested the views of the Solicitor General
We bloggers don’t generally consider the Drug and Device Law sandbox to extend to illegal drugs. We regard that as a completely separate can of worms. But what of a drug – like marijuana – that’s in between being legal and being illegal? In an increasing number of states, marijuana’s current situation is a bit
Last September, we criticized a 2-1 decision out of the Ninth Circuit, In re Google Referrer Header Privacy Litigation, 869 F.3d 737 (9th Cir. 2017), calling it a “poster child” for cy pres abuse in class actions. Read the entire post for all the gory details, but briefly, the class action settlement in Google
Our careers have seen several major pro-defense trends in product liability litigation:
Mainstreaming summary judgment: This happened when we were still young lawyers. A trilogy of United States Supreme Court cases established that summary judgment wasn’t an “extraordinary” or “disfavored” procedure, but rather part and parcel of modern litigation. The lead case in the
This guest post is by Kevin Hara, an associate at Reed Smith and relatively frequent contributor to the Blog. Here, he discusses two recent favorable procedural developments in further appeals from two really awful decisions by intermediate courts of appeals. As always, our guest posters are 100% responsible for what they write – due