We’ll have a full report on Monday, but the decision of the West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals in White v. Wyeth, No. 35296, slip op. (W.V. Dec. 17, 2010), is sufficiently important that we had to throw something up today. The two most important syllabus points say it all:
5. A private cause
West Virginia has rejected the learned intermediary doctrine, a bad decision we sliced and diced here and here. This left us wondering if a defendant has a shot of winning summary judgment on proximate causation in a West Virginia failure to warn claim. Many failure to warn claims can be defended by taking the
This just in: The West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals today reversed that scary trial court decision that held a drug manufacturer to be bound by, and incapable of disputing, FDA-DDMAC “false and misleading” violation claims in warning letters. Here’s a copy of the opinion, encaptioned, West Virginia v. Johnson & Johnson, No. 35500,
First the Digitek MDL gave us a new weapon – the “Digitek Order” – to ensure plaintiffs’ counsel comply with their Rule 11 obligations to actually investigate their clients’ claims before filing thousands of cases. Novel concept, right? And now we have another helpful opinion – a new decision out of the MDL
Those pesky state AGs, usually aided by the plaintiffs’ bar, are an increasingly important player in coordinated drug and device litigation. And there always seems to be something vaguely unfair about a state filing a parens patriae action in its backyard state court, and then waving the (state) flag about how the AG is simply
A federal trial court has held that West Virginia public policy forbids applying the learned intermediary doctrine even to patients treated outside of West Virginia.
Thus: An Alabama physician prescribes a drug to an Alabama resident. The resident uses the drug in Alabama and is allegedly injured by the drug there. Alabama law recognizes the
We’ve already deplored the recent decision of the West Virginia Supreme Court rejecting the learned intermediary rule outright, State ex rel. Johnson & Johnson Corp. v. Karl, ___ S.E.2d ___, 2007 W. Va. Lexis 57 (W. Va. June 27, 2007) (“Karl”). However, the more we’ve thought about it, the more we’re convinced