Wednesday, September 24, 2008
In this week's Findlaw column, Tony Sebok and guest Benjamin Zipursky consider Wyeth v. Levine and the "preemption temptation." Sebok and Zipursky provide a concise summary of the facts and arguments in Levine. They then focus on why the case is not the best vehicle for the Court to resolve the preemption questions:
Our aim in this column is quite simple: to indicate how poorly-suited Levine is to be the focus for the Court's inquiry into this extraordinarily important question of federalism and tort law. The problem with Levine is that the jury and the judges in Vermont handed Wyeth a loss it clearly did not deserve, because they stretched tort law to its limit (and perhaps beyond) to respond to the gripping facts before them. For any number of basic reasons, the result in Levine is pathological as a matter of products liability law.
The next part in the series will consider the merits of the preemption questions raised in Levine.