Blog

February 25th, 2015

The right to a jury trial in criminal cases is well known, but the right to a jury trial in civil cases is also a sacrosanct right under the United States Constitution. The Seventh Amendment is under attack, argues Joanne Doroshow, executive director of the Center …

February 18th, 2015

Back in November, we argued that in recent years campaign finance–especially among potential judges–has undermined Americans’ faith in the judicial branch. Thanks to ThePopTort.com, we’ve got more bad news on that front after only a few months’ time. The legal blog mentions the recent case of …

February 11th, 2015

A few months ago we wrote about a program called Leapfrog, whose goal is to assign letter grades to the country’s hospitals in an effort to establish their safety in a quantifiable, easily understandable way. Writing for PennLive, David Wenner reports that the Affordable Care …

February 4th, 2015

The investigative journalism website ProPublica, in conjunction with the New York Times medical blog The Upshot, recently published an article analyzing drug companies’ spending over the past five months in order to ascertain what drugs and medical devices they were promoting most heavily. The answer, it …

January 28th, 2015

When it comes to regulation, there are many areas in which the FDA could improve its practices–compounding pharmacies, energy drinks, herbal dietary products, generic drugs,testosterone supplements, plastic water bottles, and cancer treatments–but we can now add diabetes medication like Januvia, Byetta, and Victoza to this list …

January 21st, 2015

In 2006, eighteen-year-old Natasha Weigel was killed (along with a close friend) when the Chevrolet Cobalt she was driving left the roadway and struck several trees. It was clear immediately that the vehicle’s air bags did not deploy as they were supposed to, but the …

January 14th, 2015

What do pharmaceuticals, automobiles, reusable plastic water bottles, and roller coasters have in common? All are manufactured or operated under conditions that are inadequately regulated by the federal government, whose job it is to protect consumers from corporations valuing their bottom lines above individuals’ safety. As …

January 7th, 2015

Back in October 2012, this blog began covering a fungal meningitis outbreak originating in Massachusetts that eventually killed sixty-four people and injured over 750 more across twenty states. Authorities traced the debilitating outbreak to the New England Compounding Center, a pharmaceutical company that provided personalized …

December 31st, 2014

Last week’s post ended with a tentative prediction that over the next few years we will see a push at the national level to enact caps on damages in civil cases. To explain it simply, a cap on damages is the equivalent of denying a …

December 24th, 2014

Now that the dust has settled after this year’s midterm elections–in which thirty-three Senate seats and all 435 seats in the House of Representatives were up for grabs–both the House and the Senate will be in the hands of Republicans (for the first time since …

December 17th, 2014

This blog has been covering issues related to generic drugs–warning labels, FDA oversight, and legal immunity–for more than a year, but this industry is nothing if not persistent. One of the largest manufacturers of generic pharmaceuticals in the world–Ranbaxy Laboratories, with net revenue of $2 …

December 10th, 2014

In the past few months, this blog has explored ways in which class action lawsuits and FDA regulation affect the lives of everyday Americans. Today we will discuss the corporation Herbalife–which sells “nutrition, weight-management, energy and fitness, and personal care products”–in a story that combines …