by Brian Wolfman The Supreme Court today held in Mutual Pharmaceutical Co. v. Bartlett that FDA approval of a generic  prescription drug preempts a state-law damages claim premised on the drug's design defect. The 5-4 majority opinion is written by Justice Alito. Basically, Justice Alito says that a design-defect claim is, in effect, a claim […]

Here's the Supreme Court's order: 12-1281 NLRB V. NOEL CANNING, ET AL. The petition for a writ of certiorari is granted. In addition to the questions presented by the petition, the parties are directed to brief and argue the following question: Whether the President's recess-appointment power may be exercised when the Senate is convening every […]

That's the question addressed in "The First Amendment and Public Health, At Odds," American Journal of Law & Medicine, 39 (2013): 298-307, by Ted Mermin and Samantha Graff. Here's the article's first couple paragraphs (with the footnotes omitted): At the turn of the last century, allies of industry on the Supreme Court deployed a novel […]

Some of our readers may want to watch Ralph Nader on C-SPAN tomorrow, Saturday June 22, at 7:45 pm EDT. He'll be talking about his latest book, Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns. He'll discuss his decades of writing on topics ranging from auto safety to the Freedom of Information Act.     […]

That's the name of this article by law professor Dick Daynard. Here is the abstract: Cigarettes result in over 400,000 preventable American deaths each year. In 2011, fewer than twenty percent of adults smoked. Since the publication of the first U.S. Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health nearly fifty years ago, when smoking prevalence […]

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to a Court bent on diminishing the usefulness of Rule 23, everything looks like a class action, ready to be dismantled. -Justice Kagan, dissenting today in Amex v. Italian Colors. She doesn't cite Walmart v. Dukes, Comcast v. Behrend, Genesis Healthcare v. Symczyk, or AT&T v. […]

I noted earlier that American Express has won American Express v. Italian Colors in the Supreme Court. Here's what Justice Scalia says about the "effective vindication" doctrine — the doctrine on which the Second Circuit had relied in overriding the class-action ban contained in American Express's arbitration agreement: As we have described, the exception finds its […]

The Supreme Court today issued its opinion in American Express v. Italian Colors Restaurant. The Court holds, 5-3, in an opinion by Scalia, that an arbitration clause that bans class actions can be enforced under the Federal Arbitration Act even if the expense of individual arbitration makes it impossible to pursue a claim.