Woman’s Supreme Court Fight to Keep Jury Award Has High Impact
What may be the most important case of the U.S. Supreme Court term concerns a woman’s attempt to keep a $6 million jury award for the loss of her arm.
The victim, Diana Levine, went to the hospital with a migraine and was given a Wyeth drug for nausea, the New York Times reports. Levine contends the hospital administered the drug improperly because of the company’s failure to warn about the potential risks. The company claims the suit is impliedly pre-empted by federal food and drug law on labeling.
The pre-emption issue in Levine’s case “is less boring and more consequential than it sounds,” the Times story says. The publication notes that a second pre-emption case concerning cigarette labeling is also before the court this term.
Business groups are supporting pre-emption cases as a way to bar many kinds of personal injury suits. New York University law professor Catherine Sharkey told the Times that federal pre-emption is “the fiercest battle in products liability law today.”
The Supreme Court ruled in another pre-emption case in February called Riegel v. Medtronic. It held that pre-market approval of medical devices by the Food and Drug Administration bars injury lawsuits by those who say they were harmed by the products.
Sharkey says Riegel was based on statutory interpretation while Levine’s case “challenges the court to define the parameters of pre-emption outside the safe confines of the legislators’ text.”
