The First Circuit addressed the latter issue well in Wilder v. 56 change the dynamic so an unopposed expert turns into partial summary judgment for the plaintiff? No and no.įrankly, the more interesting flip side to this coin is when the plaintiff files a “reverse Daubert” motion on the defense medical causation expert or otherwise seeks to require that the defense expert offer an opinion to a reasonable degree of medical probability/certainty as to what other than the defendant’s product caused the plaintiff’s alleged injuries. So, does a defendant have to present witnesses, expert or otherwise, on every issue as to which plaintiff bears the burden of proof? Does something about Fed.
#JUDGMENT AS A MATTER OF LAW TRIAL#
Defense trial lawyers with a lot of, er, gumption have been known to rest at the end of plaintiff’s case without presenting any witnesses. Pattern jury instructions often include some version of the phrase “the defendant does not have to prove anything.” The Federal Rules for Civil Procedure include a provision for judgment as a matter of law, colloquially known as directed verdict. The issue at hand is whether a plaintiff should win partial summary judgment on an element of her case as to which she bears the burden of proof-in this case, medical causation-when the defendant does not have an expert on that element.
Considering the “ink spilled” on this issue in this more than a decade-old case made us shake our heads. We cannot fathom how deprived tweens and teens of past generations were by their lack of duh as a standalone comeback, particularly to an older person.) The issue teed up in Campbell v. (We were somewhat surprised to learn from the interwebs that duh was supposedly first used in 1943 as a demeaning imitation of an unintelligent person and sometime later as an interjection.
So obvious, in fact, that we might respond to question about these principles with this most dismissive of (clean) interjections. We apologize for the depth of our profundity, but there are some legal principles we think are really obvious.
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