Last week we gave you our federal class action denial cheat sheet [cite]. This week we’re posting a similar list of class action denials from state courts. It took some work, but we’ve been able to dig up certification denials from eleven different states. If you’ve got others, send them along.

With the Class Action Fairness Act moving most class action litigation to federal court, there may not be very many new (more…)

Philadelphia has seen more than its share of perplexing decisions. This is where the Founders gave Delaware the same number of Senators as New York. The great painter Thomas Eakins scandalized his high-strung, high society patrons by permitting female students to paint male nude models. Bad career move. Fregosi let Mitch Williams pitch to Joe Carter. Another bad career move. Somebody here thought of pouring cheeze-wiz over low-grade, high-grease meat. (more…)

Almost from the day this blog was founded, we’ve been arguing that class actions have no place in prescription medical product liability litigation. We’ve put up severalpostscontaininglists of cases to that effect – but none of them were complete (or purported to be).

One of the things that we’ve often thought about doing someday was putting together a truly comprehensive list of all the decisions denying class certification (more…)

One side effect of the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation’s refusal to make the pain pump cases an MDL is that many different courts are ruling on the inadequacy of the pain pump complaints. The Western District of Pennsylvania took its turn last week in Kester v. Zimmer Holdings, Inc., 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 59869 (W.D. Pa. June 16, 2010). The opinion contains a few useful rulings.

1. It is a commonplace that a defendant (more…)

We don’t subscribe to the theory of collective conscience, though when Julie Delpy talks about it in Waking Life it’s hard to disagree. Still, there are times when you find yourself repeatedly stumbling against the same idea in ways that seem beyond coincidence. Last week we praised a federal judge in New Jersey who sent Intron plaintiffs packing for want of standing. The week before, we blogged about potential TwIqbal misfires, including one painful (more…)

We’ve posted quite a biton the substantive due process aspects of punitive damages. Other than that, we frankly hadn’t thought about substantive due process being applicable to other aspects of product liability litigation.

Well, it’s time to start thinking.

A decision has just come down that accepts the argument that the expansion of state common-law tort liability can be so overreaching and so contrary (more…)

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 denying class certification. SeeIn re Digitek Prods. Liab. Litig., 2010 WL 2102330 (S.D. W. Va. May (more…)

We’ve reported before on the good decisions from the federal district court in New Jersey rejecting putative class actions based on off-label marketing, including a decision earlier this year and the Intron/Temodardecision last year. The first Intron/Temodar decision gave the third-party payer plaintiffs leave to amend their complaint. They did, and the court has now found their amended complaint insufficient and dismissed the action. In (more…)

We’ve got a search with one of the services that notifies us whenever any new opinion cites Buckman Co. v. Plaintiffs’ Legal Committee, 531 U.S. 341 (2001). Why? Well, there’s preemption, of course – which is what Buckman’s all about. But more generally, we like this search because cases that cite Buckman are just likely to be interesting cases.

We know…. That (more…)

The Third Circuit issued an important medical monitoring decision yesterday. Sheridan v. NGK Metals Corp., 2010 WL 2246392 (3d Cir. June 7, 2010). Although this case does not involve a drug or a device, several rulings should prove useful to lawyers who handle drug and device cases. To get the key points of this hot little decision in your hands quickly, we’ll cut right to the chase without Monty Python clips, exercises in alliteration, (more…)