9/11 Fund Starts Making Payment to Victims

Workers' Compensation: 9/11 Fund Starts Making Payment to Victims:
by Jon Gelman

 "The Zadroga 9/11 Victims Claim Fund has started to make payments to victims of the World Trade Center attack. First Responders andthose who lived or worked in the immediate geographical site near "ground zero" may be entitled to the payment of benefits for illness and injuries that they suffer as a result of the terrorist attack.
Those eligible include, individuals present at  a 9/11 crash site at the time of or in the immediate aftermath, who suffer physical harm as a result of the crashes or debris removal. Also the personal representatives of individuals who were present at a 9/11 crash site, who died as a result of the crashes or debris removal, are eligible to file claims."

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Most Bohai Bay oil spill claims settled, Conoco Phillips reports

ConocoPhillips Company’s description of the Administrative Process for Requesting Compensation under China’s Ministry of Agriculture’s Settlement Fund

Most oil pollution damage claims by aquaculturist and fishermen families from the provinces of Liaoning (78%) and Hebei (95%)  have been settled, Conoco Phillips reports.  In an action brought in Texas by fishermen from Shandong  province whose claims were not recognized, Conoco has filed a "description of the administrative process for requesting compensation" under its settlement with China's Ministry of Agriculture for the June 2010 oil spills at its Bohai Bay Peng Lai oil fields in China's north.

The settlement fund - established by direct negotiation with the national government, is administered at the county level.  Although the Tianjin maritime court has accepted fishermen's lawsuits, the description filed in the U.S. District Court in Houston by COPC mentions no role for the courts in the distribution of the negotiated fund. - GWC

OTHERWISE: Washington & Lee is the Best Legal Education Story of 2013 | William Henderson - JDSupra

OTHERWISE: Washington & Lee is the Best Legal Education Story of 2013 | William Henderson - JDSupra:



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ALI responds to criticism by Center for Tobacco Control

OTHERWISE: ALI responds to criticism by Center for Tobacco Control: "ALI President Roberta Ramo and Director Lance Liebman have posted The ALI’s Response to the Center for Tobacco Control Research & Education, 98 Iowa L. Rev. Bull 1 (2013).
 Laposata, et al. called for the ALI to adopt a policy of interest disclosure similar to that of  the National Academies: "Until the ALI adopts and enforces meaningful, effective, and transparent  conflict of interest policies, their work should not be taken without question as unbiased authoritative documents worthy of reliance by our courts and legislatures"."



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DePuy Hid Data About Failed Hip Implant, Documents Show - NYTimes.com

image by Childers, Schlueter & Smith, LLC

According to plaintiff's opening argument in the first bellwether trial in Los Angeles Superior Court DePuy Hid Data About Failed Hip Implant, Documents Show - NYTimes.com: 
by Barry Meier
"Johnson & Johnson executives knew years before they recalled a troubled artificial hip in 2010 that it had a critical design flaw, but the company concealed that information from physicians and patients, according to internal documents disclosed on Friday during a trial related to the device’s failure."

for further information see the DePuy page on this blog.

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Linda Riss dies at 75

Linda Riss Pugach dies at 75 - NY Times
The plaintiff in Riss v. City of New York (1967) has died.  Generations of law students have learned that you can't sue the police for failure to protect you from a stalker who has threatened you with violence.  The bizarre end of this tragedy is that she married the man who had blinded her. - GWC

Linda Riss, later Pugach, with Burt, whom she married after he hired thugs who blinded her with lye 

"Linda Riss Pugach, whose blinding by her lover, Burton N. Pugach, in 1959 became a news media sensation, and whose marriage to Mr. Pugach in 1974 became an equally sensational sequel, died at Forest Hills Hospital in Queens on Tuesday at 75.

The cause was heart failure, said Mr. Pugach, her husband of more than 38 years and her only immediate survivor...."

In 1974, The New York Times called the attack on Miss Riss “one of the most celebrated crimes of passion in New York history.” In the years since, the strange romance of Mr. and Mrs. Pugach (pronounced POOH-gash) has seldom been far from public view.

A book about the couple, “A Very Different Love Story,” by Berry Stainback, was published in 1976. More recently, the Pugaches were the subject of a widely seen documentary, “Crazy Love.”

Johnson & Johnson Aware of 40% Failure in Hip Implant - NYTimes.com

Maker Aware of 40% Failure in Hip Implant - NYTimes.com: by Barry Meier
 "An internal analysis conducted by Johnson & Johnson in 2011 not long after it recalled a troubled hip implant estimated that the all-metal device would fail within five years in nearly 40 percent of patients who received it, newly disclosed court records show."
Childress Schlueter & Smith - a plaintiffs law firm - discusses the DePuy ASR hip implant recall HERE.

Morgan Stanley sold "nuclear holocaust" housing bonds in 2007

Financial crisis suit documents point to bad behaviour by morgan stanley

BY JESSE EISINGER, PROPUBLICA

"On March 16, 2007, Morgan Stanley employees working on one of the toxic assets that helped blow up the world economy discussed what to name it. Among the team members’ suggestions: “Subprime Meltdown,” “Hitman,” “Nuclear Holocaust” and “Mike Tyson’s Punchout,” as well a simple yet direct reference to a bag of excrement.

Ha ha. Those hilarious investment bankers.

Then they gave it its real name and sold it to a Chinese bank.

We are never going to have a full understanding of what bad behavior bankers conducted in the years leading up to the financial crisis. The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission have failed to hold big wrongdoers to account.

The results are explosive. Hundreds of pages of internal Morgan Stanley documents, released publicly last week, shed much new light on what bankers knew at the height of the housing bubble and what they did with that secret knowledge.

The lawsuit concerns a $500 million collateralized debt obligation called Stack 2006-1, created in the first half of 2006. Collections of mortgage-backed securities, C.D.O.’s were at the heart of the financial crisis.

But the documents suggest a pattern of behavior larger than this one deal: people across the bank understood that the American housing market was in trouble. They took advantage of that knowledge to create and then bet against securities and then also to unload garbage investments on unsuspecting buyers.

Morgan Stanley doesn’t see the narrative as the plaintiffs do. The firm is fighting the lawsuit, contending that the buyers were sophisticated clients and could have known what was going on in the subprime market. The C.D.O. documents disclosed, albeit obliquely, that Morgan Stanley might bet against the securities, a strategy known as shorting. The firm did not pick the assets going into the deal (though it was able to veto any assets). And any shorting of the deal was part of a larger array of trades, both long and short. Indeed, Morgan Stanley owned a big piece of Stack, in addition to its short bet...."

OTHERWISE: Obama's Second Inaugural: Liberty and Security

OTHERWISE: Obama's Second Inaugural: Liberty and Security:
President Obama's overarching themes in his second inaugural were expanding liberty, and reconciling liberty and security. James Fallows, a former presidential speechwriter, highlights two powerful allusions in President Obama's Second Inaugural Address - the "lash and sword" and "Seneca, Selma, and Stonewall" which develop the theme of expanding liberty. 

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FDA - Metallic Hip Implants Require Premarket Approval

93,000 of these devices have been recalled, reports plaintiffs lawyer Mark Cornwall in this advertisement.

One of the most grievous loopholes in the system for regulating medical devices is the minimal pre-market review requirements for devices that are "substantial equivalents" of devices available before the 1976 Medical Device Amendments.  Dramatically new devices - such as metal on metal hip implants escaped significant scrutiny.  That is about to change: such devices will now be subjected to rigorous premarket review according to a new proposed rule.  In a new safety alert the FDA has encouraged practitioners to report adverse events and has ordered device manufacturers to conduct post-market surveillance studies.

The move is in response to thousands of patient reports of complications from metal on metal implants, the FDA reports:

 In metal-on-metal hip implants, the metal ball and the metal cup slide against each other during walking or running. Metal can be released from other parts of the implant where two implant components connect.  Metal release will cause some tiny metal particles to wear off of the device around the implant, which may cause damage to bone and/or soft tissue surrounding the implant and joint. Soft tissue damage may lead to pain, implant loosening, device failure and the need for revision surgery Some of the metal ions released will enter the bloodstream and travel to other parts of the body, where they may cause symptoms or illnesses elsewhere in the body. 

Postmarket Surveillance studies are part of what I have called the duty of product stewardship, and the Institute of Medicine in its 2006 report The Future of Drug Safety called a "life-cycle approach" to drug safety.  The heart of the approach is that a product manufacturer has an affirmative duty to monitor how its product actually performs after marketing permission is granted by the FDA.