A talisman is something thought to protect whoever has it from
evil or harm. In the old days a talisman might be something like garlic to ward off vampires or the Seal of Solomon to keep away various evil
spirits. Nowadays, there aren't so many – although it
seems there are some people out there who appear to view Robert Mueller as something of a talisman.
How about preemption?
We noticed something recently in the course of making sure that
our preemption scorecards for
PMA device and
generic drug preemption are current.
We don't see many preemption cases that need to be included
in either scorecard coming out of multi-district litigation. For
example, in the
PMA preemption scorecard, there are exactly five cases with
"In re" in their title. The last one was In re
Medtronic, Inc., Sprint Fidelis Leads Products Liability
Litigation, 623 F.3d 1200 (8th Cir. 2010), which involved
a pre-Riegel MDL essentially getting wiped out by
a single preemption motion. Since
