May 5, 2021 โ Plaintiffs in the Zantac multidistrict litigation are utilizing the U.S. Supreme Courtโs recent ruling in Ford Motor Co v. Montana Eighth District.
The March 25 decision in the Ford case held that state courts in Montana and Minnesota had jurisdiction over product liability claims against Ford despite the company not directly selling the defective vehicles in the states.
Ford argued that in-state residents who were affected by crashes in Montana and Minnesota were not permitted to sue in their own state courts because Ford did not design, manufacture or sell the allegedly defective vehicles there. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Fordโs argument and ruled that, because Ford was very active in selling vehicles in the two states, Montana and Minnesota state courts had jurisdiction to hear the plaintiffsโ cases.ย
Justice Elena Kagan stated in the courtโs majority opinion that plaintiffs only need to show a connection between their lawsuit and the defendantโs actions in their state.ย Ford had argued that the plaintiffs needed to show that the defendantโs actions in their state had caused their injuries.ย The decision is popular and has already been cited in 31 cases, mainly to clarify the jurisdiction issue.
Zantac lawsuit lawyers for plaintiffs, specifically those who took a generic version of Zantac (ranitidine), are also seizing the opportunity to use the recent ruling to their advantage.ย The plaintiffs have faced a similar jurisdictional challenge that the Ford plaintiffs battled in the states of California and Massachusetts.ย
They argued in a brief filed on April 23, 2021 in West Palm Beach, Florida that the โlaw has been entirely overruled by Ford,โ referring specifically to the 11th U.S. Court of Appeals but-for rule.
Both Massachusetts and California have โinnovator liabilityโ laws that allow people who have taken generic versions of a drug to claim that the drugโs originators misrepresented risks in the drugโs labels. The supreme courts of both states allowed claims under the laws which resulted in 2017โs T.H. v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp in California and 2018โs Rafferty v. Merck & Co Inc in Massachusetts.
Despite those laws seeming to favor the Zantac plaintiffs, U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenberg, the judge over the Zantac MDL, dismissed the plaintiffsโ innovator liability claims in December 2020 on jurisdictional grounds.ย
Rosenberg cited a 2018 precedent from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Waite v. All Acquisition Corp, stating that personal injury plaintiffs who are asserting specific jurisdiction are required to show that the defendantโs actions within the courtโs home state directly led to the alleged injury.ย The judge stated that the plaintiffs did not claim a causal link between their claims and the marketing activities in both California and Massachusetts by name-brand Zantac defendants.
Judge Rosenberg allowed the plaintiffs to amend their complaint so that they could claim that the actions taken by the name-brand Zantac defendants in California and Massachusetts caused the plaintiffs to take the generic form of Zantac called ranitidine. The new complaint explained that the marketing in the two states led to a higher demand for Zantac, and in turn caused higher sales of the generic version.
On March 24, one day before the Supreme Court ruled on the Ford case, name-brand defendants Pfizer Inc, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Sanofi SA, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Patheon NV moved to dismiss the amended claim.ย They argued that they did not affect the introduction of ranitidine into the marketplace.ย
In the defendantโs brief, they said, โIn short, while California and Massachusetts may choose to adopt their own novel tort principles governing companies based there, due process forbids them from applying those laws extraterritorially to hold the out-of-state brand-name manufacturers liable for the sales of other companiesโ products.โย They continued with, โPlaintiffsโ highly attenuated theory of liability leaves them with no basis for specific jurisdiction.โ
The plaintiffs argued the opposite.ย They claimed that the Ford decision requires plaintiffs to show that a defendant conducted business within the jurisdiction and that the plaintiffโs lawsuit relates to the defendantโs actions within the jurisdiction.
The plaintiffs said that there is no doubt that name-brand defendants were involved in marketing in California and Massachusetts.ย According to the plaintiffsโ application of the Ford decision, the defendants did not need to directly sell ranitidine in order to relate to the plaintiffsโ claims and hold responsibility for the failure to warn about both Zantac and ranitidineโs carcinogenic risk.
Reference: ย Frankel, Alison. โZantac Generics Plaintiffs Hope SCOTUS Ford Decision Rescues Claims against Brand-Name Makers.โ Reuters, Thomson Reuters, 27 Apr. 2021, www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-zantac-idUSKBN2CE2NX.