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Recent cases of importance to you and your practice.
An audit by Wal-Mart of 128 stores and over 25,000 employees has reportedly revealed thousands of labor violations at the Arkansas-based retailing chain, including 1371 violations of child labor laws, 60,000 missed breaks and16,000 skipped meal times, primarily in violation of state labor laws. The July, 2000 internal audit was apparently distributed to high-level company executives but has now come to public attention through lawsuits filed against the company, which employs more than 1.2 million U.S. workers.
Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich sent a letter on December 22 to Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson asking that Thompson approve Illinois' plan to import pharmaceutical products from Canada for use by the state's employees and retirees. The governor, who has been pushing for months to gain the right to purchase drugs for Illinois from less-expensive sources in Canada, stated in his letter, "I was encouraged by your recent statements regarding your willingness to approve a small-scale demonstration project around the issue of re-importation of prescription drugs from Canada. We would like to work with you to design an effective pilot program that complies with the law." Blagojevich hopes his state will become the "small-scale demonstration project" Thompson spoke of.
The latest news of importance to you and your practice.
Fen-Phen litigation is entering a critical phase that promises to be at least as complex and contentious as anything that preceded it. The national settlement that was supposed to buy peace is now smack in the middle of the storm that swirls, as always, around Wyeth. Claims against the Madison, NJ-based drug manufacturer are moving slowly through the $3.75 billion trust Wyeth funded to compensate people whose heart valves were damaged by its diet drugs. Lawyers and clients have been highly critical of the delays.
Recent rulings of importance to you and your practice.
In order to avoid drowning in the sea of mass tort litigation, drug and medical device companies must aggressively and "offensively" defend these actions -- and do so as soon as the mass tort litigation emerges. Critical to stemming the mass tort tide is an understanding of the factors that drive the filing of these actions against pharmaceutical and medical device companies: 1) the ease with which controversial issues relating to drugs and medical devices can be recognized; and 2) complicated causation issues. Armed with that understanding, the single most important pre-trial goal for any defendant must be the early exposure of frivolous claims based on tenuous causation and junk science.
A series of amendments to the New York Civil Practice Law and Rules &sect&sect 2305, 3120, and 3122 took effect on Sept. 1, 2003 and, among other things, eliminated the need for motions and court orders before a party may serve a subpoena <i>duces tecum</i> on a non-party.
Highlights of the latest product liability cases from around the country.
Features
D. Jeffrey Campbell and Julie Smith Stypinski in their article this month direct readers to the Web site for The Federalist Society, <i>www.fed-soc.org,</i> for a transcript of a symposium on gun litigation. The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It was founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to the Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
