No Causation, No "Parallel Claim"

The district court's order dismissing claims in Ebrahimi v. Mentor Worldwide LLC, No. CV 16-7316, 2017 WL 4128976 (C.D. Cal. Sept. 15, 2017), is a good antidote to the Ninth Circuit's wrongly decided opinion in Stengel v. Medtronic. Stengel is where the Ninth Circuit held that the plaintiff avoided express preemption by alleging that a pre-market approved medical device manufacturer failed to report adverse events to the FDA, thus violating FDCA regulations and a "parallel" state-law duty to warn. We have criticized Stengel any number of times, but you can read this and this to get the gist. The most obviously questionable aspect of Stengel is its application of a California state-law duty to warn the FDA, which we are not convinced exists in the first place.