Rodriguez v. Stryker Corp.’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

5 federal appellate · 3 district ·

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 15 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “While the pre-2004 medical articles raise the general notion that health of (usually animal) cartilage could be weakened by prolonged exposure to certain “foreign elements,” it is a bridge way too far to say that Stryker — in the context in which infusion pumps were broadly used and medically accepted without reservation — should have, prior to marketing the pain pump, culled through seven decades of literature, found the sporadic articles raising this concern, ignored all the authority/evidence to the contrary, and then independently concluded that its pain pump could cause chondrolysis, particularly where no one in the medical community connected the destruction of cartilage to the use of pain pumps until after the plaintiffs surgery.”

   2 later decisions quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. Mack v. Stryker Corp. · Mack v. Stryker Corp.

2. “When all is said and done, not one of Rodriguez’s thirteen articles shows that medical experts understood in 2004 that infusing a joint with bupivacaine for two days could cause irreversible cartilage damage. [The manufacturer] had no duty to understand what the relevant medical literature did not.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. 960 F. Supp. 2d 700 - Prather v. Abbot Laboratories