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Class Action

Mass Tort Litigation Blog

Law professors discuss mass tort and class action lawsuits.

Post Frequency: 9.9/day

Last Entry: March 29, 2011 at 17:41:19

Tobacco, the FDA, and Preemption

Posted on June 08, 2009
Op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal -- Tobacco and the Tort Bar, by Mark H. Berlind. Here's an excerpt: Congress is on the verge of passing sweeping legislation that would empower the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to regulate tobacco...

Chemerinsky on Why Law Professors Write

Posted on June 06, 2009
Dean Erwin Chemerinsky (UC Irvine) has an interesting article entitled, Why Write?, 107 Mich. L. Rev. 881 (2009). Here's the abstract: What is the purpose of legal scholarship? The foreword to the University of Michigan Law Review's book review issue...

Claim Ipsa Loquitur

Posted on June 03, 2009
Plausibility pleading is a rough procedural analogue to the tort doctrine of res ipsa loquitur. Res ipsa translates from the Latin into "the thing speaks for itself." The idea is that there are some types of accidents that could not...

Dooley on National Juries

Posted on June 03, 2009
Laura Dooley (Valparaiso) has posted an article entitled National Juries for National Cases: Preserving Citizen Participation in Large Scale Litigation. Here is the abstract: Procedural evolution in complex cases seems to have left the civil jury behind...

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Litigation Financing

Posted on June 02, 2009
The NYTimes' Jonathan Glater has a great article on financial firms that invest in large-scale litigation (mostly large companies suing one another) called "Investing in Lawsuits - For a Share of the Awards. The link is here. They claim their...

Transnational Mass Torts: Lawyer Opposes Nigerian Settlement with Pfizer

Posted on May 29, 2009
The AP story is here. The American Constitution Society reports the following on the case: West Haven lawyer Richard Altschuler has gone to federal court to block a $75 million Nigerian court settlement between Pfizer and the Nigerian government involving...

The Drug and Device Guys on Prefiling Discovery

Posted on May 29, 2009
Here's what they write, with a link too... We're not opposed to precomplaint discovery in principle. It exists, for example, in Pennsylvania, which is a fact pleading state. If there's something specific that's critical, precomplaint discovery works OK...

Brunet on the Origins of Plausibility as a Pleadings Standard

Posted on May 28, 2009
A lot of people have been writing about the new pleading standards lately. One very intriguing observation was offered by Prof. Edward Brunet (Lewis & Clark Law School). Brunet is the author of a treatise on summary judgment and links...

Products Liability and the New Pleading Era

Posted on May 28, 2009
The folks over at Drug and Device Law Blog have a post about plausibility pleading as applied to products liability cases. Here is the link. ADL

Continuing Debate over "Opt-Out" Collective Redress in England and Wales

Posted on May 26, 2009
The United States isn't the only country experiencing civil reforms (i.e., Iqbal and Twombly). England and Wales are reevaluating their rules of civil procedure and the debate over class actions or "collective redress" has been brewing for some time. On...

New Blog with Occasional Mass Tort Posts

Posted on May 20, 2009
George Conk - an adjunct professor of law at Fordham and a practicing lawyer - has a blog and occasionally posts on interesting issues related to mass torts. He has a post on the Vioxx trials in Australia here and...

The Plausible Pleading Standard

Posted on May 20, 2009
Civil Procedure buffs have been reacting to the Supreme Court decision Ashcroft v. Iqbal, which affirmed that "plausibility" pleading applies to all cases in Federal Court under Rule 8. Here is a useful post by Scott Dodson on the Civil...

Merck's New Journal

Posted on May 16, 2009
Concurring Opinions has an interesting post titled "Mercketing," which describes how Merck and Elsevier created their own "journal" in Australia. Yet, perhaps to make it look, er, less "slanted" the journal is called the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint...

Skadden Successfully Recruits John Beisner, Stephen Harburg, and Jessica Davidson Miller of O'Melveny

Posted on May 14, 2009
According to this press release from Skadden, John Beisner, Stephen Harburg , and Jessica Davidson Miller will leave O'Melveny and join Skadden's Washington, D.C. office. John Beisner, chair of O' Melveny's Class Actions, Mass Torts, and Aggregated Litigation Practice, represented...

WLF's Richard Samp Discusses New D.C. Cir. Decision on Independent Contractors

Posted on May 14, 2009
The Washington Legal Foundation's Richard Samp has an interesting, short paper discussing a recent D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision rejecting the right-to-control test to distinguish independent contractors from employees, and instead substituting an extent-of-entrepreneurial-opportunity test...

Plaintiffs' Teflon Class Actions Against Dupont Don't Stick

Posted on May 14, 2009
As Allison Frankel reports at AmLaw Litigation Daily, plaintiffs in the Teflon MDL proceedings have filed a joint motion to drop their consumer-fraud class-action cases. Dupont understandably has high praise for its outside counsel, Bartlit Beck. Dupont's General Counsel Thomas...

Merck's International Litigation Strategy

Posted on May 13, 2009
An article in the New York Times entitled "Trial Puts Spotlight on Merck" describes Merck's continuing litigation internationally, with a focus on a Vioxx trial currently under way in Australia. This trial is receiving substantial media coverage in Australia, according...

An Empirical Assessment of Punitive Damages

Posted on May 12, 2009
Theodore Eisenberg (Cornell), Michael Heise and Martin T. Wells have recently posted "Variability in Punitive Damages: An Empirical Assessment of the U.S. Supreme Court's Decision in Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker" - available on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Exxon...

9/11 Statistical Discovery

Posted on May 06, 2009
What's going on with the 9/11 "First Responder" cases these days? I just saw the following article in NYLJ - "Plan Implemented to Resolve Complex Suits in World Trade Center Cleanup." The special masters who are creating this plan are...

Weinstein: Some Pessimism About Aggregate Litigation

Posted on May 06, 2009
Judge Weinstein has published a short essay on the administration of complex litigations in a new on-line publication of the Cardozo Law Review called De Novo. The essay, entitled "Preliminary Reflections on the Administration of Complex Litigations" describes a few...

Supreme Court Ruling Makes Government Recovery More Difficult in Toxic Torts

Posted on May 05, 2009
In Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 to limit corporate liability under Superfund. Here's an except from Adam Liptak's article in the New York Times: The federal government had...

Cert Granted in Important Class Action Case

Posted on May 04, 2009
The Supreme Court today granted certification in Shady Grove Orthopedic Assoc., P.A. v. Allstate Insurance Co. (docket no. 08-1008). This may be a case that decides the future of the much-maligned procedural rule - the money damages class action. The...

Justice Souter Retiring

Posted on May 01, 2009
Justice David Souter plans to retire from the Supreme Court when the term ends in June, according to new accounts. In the field of mass torts, Justice Souter authored the majority opinion in Ortiz v. Fibreboard Corp., the 1999 decision...

Plaintiffs' Attorneys Feuding Over Fees

Posted on May 01, 2009
Judge Faith Hochberg of the District of New Jersey urged plaintiffs' lawyers to cooperate and coordinate discovery rather than devolve into a feeding frenzy for attorneys' fees. The case isn't a mass tort; rather, it is a putative health insurance...

The Law of the Banana

Posted on April 27, 2009
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney dismissed two tort cases against Dow Chemical and Dole as fraudulent. The suits alleged that chemicals manufactured by the defendants and used on banana plantations caused sterility. Law.com reports of the lawyers' misconduct...

Katrina Litigation Moves Forward

Posted on April 20, 2009
The New York Times reports that a lawsuit by property owners against the US Army Corps of Engineers regarding the breaking of the levees during Hurricane Katrina begins today. Click this link to get to the article. The article notes...

Wall Street Journal on Provenge & the FDA

Posted on April 20, 2009
Editorial in today's Wall Street Journal on the delay in approving prostate-cancer drug Provenge by the FDA -- Prostate Cancer and FDA Politics: Their first priority should be to save patients. Here's an excerpt: The larger question is why Provenge...

U.S. Homeowner Health Problems from Chinese Drywall

Posted on April 17, 2009
Article in the Wall Street Journal -- Homeowner Problems With Chinese-Made Drywall Spread, by Michael Corkery. Here's an excerpt: Complaints about foul-smelling Chinese-made drywall that first emerged in a few dozen homes in Florida in January have spread to hundreds...

Second Wall Street Journal Editorial on Plaintiffs' Lawyers Hired for Contingency Fee by State of Pennsylvania

Posted on April 16, 2009
Following last week's editorial, the Wall Street Journal expanded its discussion in today's editorial. Here's an excerpt: Our editorial last week on the state lawsuit racket has created a stir in Pennsylvania, where Governor Ed Rendell has finally had to...

Damage Compensation for Low Probability/High Damage Events

Posted on April 15, 2009
Richard Lempert (Michigan) has posted an article entitled Low Probability/High Consequence Events: Dilemmas for Damage Compensation on bepress. Here is the abstract: This article was prepared for a Clifford Symposium which challenged paper writers to imagine how our system of...

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