By The Petrie-Flom Center An op-ed from our friends Mark Barnes and Barbara Bierer at Harvard’s Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center on recent legal changes to India’s clinical trial requirements, arguing that using the clinical trial context to promote a social or political policy agenda in India may sacrifice scientific integrity in the service of social justice. A…
By Alex Stein This difficult problem and the underlying human tragedy have recently been adjudicated by the Supreme Court of Mississippi in Truddle v. Baptist Memorial Hosp.-Desoto, Inc., — So.3d —- (Miss. 2014). A hospital patient suffering from a number of illnesses became agitated and aggressive. He took the IV out of his arm and attempted…
By Christine Baugh On November 19, Judge Anita Brody will hold a fairness hearing in the class action lawsuit of National Football League (NFL) Players v. NFL re: concussion injury. This is one of the final steps toward final approval (or rejection) of the settlement in the case. Before final approval Judge Brody must determine that…
By Emily Largent I previously wrote about California Proposition 46–which proposed to raise the cap on pain and suffering awards in malpractice cases from $250,000 to $1.1 million, require doctors to check a statewide database of drug prescriptions before prescribing some narcotics, and require doctors to undergo random drug and alcohol testing–here. What happened? On Tuesday, voters “soundly defeated a…
By: Michelle Mello, JD, PhDStanford Law School and Stanford University School of Medicine On November 4, Californians will vote on Proposition 46, a ballot initiative to adjust the $250,000 state’s noneconomic damages cap in medical malpractice cases for inflation, raising it to $1.1 million virtually overnight. It’s a long overdue move – California has one of the…
By Kate Greenwood [Cross-posted at Health Reform Watch] As I have blogged about before, last year, in Kaiser v. Pfizer, the First Circuit joined the handful of courts to have approved a causal chain of injury running from a pharmaceutical company’s fraudulent promotion, through the prescribing decisions of thousands of individual physicians, to the prescriptions for…
By Alex Stein An important development of the lost-chance doctrine recently took place in Rash v. Providence Health & Services, — P.3d —- (Wash.App.Div.3 2014). An 82-year old patient with a critical heart condition was hospitalized to undergo surgery. The patient’s heart condition made her death inevitable, but she managed to prolong her life with the…
By Alex Stein Malpractice suits filed in connection with reproductive-choice procedures often present unique problems. The suit filed by Jami Conner against her former gynecologist, Dr. Bryan Hodges, is a case in point. The plaintiff, a mother of two children, decided that she did not want to have more children. To avoid future pregnancy, she asked…
By Alex Stein As I wrote in my book with Ariel Porat, Tort Liability Under Uncertainty, our torts system must develop systematic remedy for wrongful inflictions of evidentiary harm. The Florida Supreme Court’s recent decision, Saunders v. Dickens, — So.3d —- (Fla. 2014), is a case in point.
By Nicolas Terry Sutter Health v. Superior Court, 2014 WL 3589699 (Cal. App. 2014), is a medical data breach class action case that raises questions beyond the specifics of the Californian Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. The stakes were high in Sutter — under the California statute medical data breach claims trigger (or should trigger!) nominal…
