Guest Post – Revisiting The Third Circuit's Struggles With Design-Defect Preemption

Today we have another guest post by long-time friend of the blog, Dick Dean, and his colleague at Tucker, Ellis, Mike Ruttinger. Regular readers will recall, that right after Sikkelee v. Precision Airmotive Corp., ___ F.3d ___, 2018 WL 5289702 (3d. Cir. Oct. 25, 2018), was decided, we blogged about the aspect of that decision that we thought was most directly relevant to drug/device litigation – the court's rejection of tort claims based on failure to make reports to government agencies. We briefly mentioned the remainder of the Third Circuit's decision (which was actually by far the lengthier discussion), but didn't spend much time on it. In this post, Dick and Mike rectify that oversight. As always, our guest bloggers deserve 100% of the credit (and any blame) for their discussion.