Opinion ID: 614031
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Kentucky Products Liability Law

Text: On appeal, the plaintiffs also argue that the district court erred in granting the name-brand defendants' motion for summary judgment on their state-law claims. The district court first concluded that plaintiffs' tort claims were subject to Kentucky's Products Liability Act, KY.REV. STAT. §§ 411.300-411.350 (2010). The court then held that the claims could not succeed because the plaintiffs alleged that generic metoclopramide, not the defendants' name-brand product Reglan, caused their injuries. As a result, the action against the name-brand defendants was dismissed. We review the district court's dismissal de novo, construing the complaint in the plaintiffs' favor and taking all well-pleaded allegations in the complaint as true. See Beaudry v. TeleCheck Servs., Inc., 579 F.3d 702, 704 (6th Cir.2009). The Kentucky Products Liability Act, a codification of preexisting common-law principles, defines a product liability action as any action brought for or on account of personal injury, death or property damage caused by or resulting from the manufacture, construction, design, formulation . . . warning, instructing, marketing, advertising, packaging or labeling of any product. KY.REV.STAT. § 411.300(1) (2010). As the Kentucky Supreme Court has held, [t]he [Products Liability Act] applies to all damage claims arising from the use of products, regardless of the legal theory advanced. Monsanto Co. v. Reed, 950 S.W.2d 811, 814 (Ky.1997). We conclude that the district court correctly applied the Act here. A threshold requirement of any products-liability claim is that the plaintiff assert that the defendant's product caused the plaintiff's injury. See Holbrook v. Rose, 458 S.W.2d 155, 157 (Ky.1970). The plaintiffs in this case concede that they had consumed only generic versions of metoclopramide and not Reglan. As the district court observed, adopting their theory of liability would require the court to attribute any deficiency in a name-brand manufacturer's labeling and marketing of its products to products manufactured by its generic competitors. Such a theory, however, fails to satisfy the threshold requirement of a products-liability action that the defendant's product have injured the plaintiff. As the district court stated, Just because a company is in the same business as a tortfeasor, the company is not automatically liable for the harm caused by the tortfeasor's product. The plaintiffs' argumentthat the name-brand defendants' liability stems from the fact that the regulatory structure governing name-brand and generic drugs makes it foreseeable that patients and their physicians will rely on the name-brand labels to use and prescribe generic drugshas been rejected by all but one of the courts that have considered it. The leading case is Foster v. American Home Products Corp., 29 F.3d 165 (4th Cir.1994), in which the court held that the manufacturer of a name-brand drug has no duty to patients who ingested only a generic version of the drug manufactured by the name-brand drug company's competitors. See also Colacicco v. Apotex, Inc., 432 F.Supp.2d 514, 540-41 (E.D.Pa.2006) (collecting cases), rev'd on other grounds, 521 F.3d 253 (3d Cir.2008). But see Conte v. Wyeth, Inc., 168 Cal.App.4th 89, 85 Cal. Rptr.3d 299, 313 (2008) ([W]e have no difficulty concluding that [the name-brand defendant] should reasonably perceive that there could be injurious reliance on its product information by a patient taking generic metoclopramide.). As have the majority of courts to address this question, we reject the argument that a name-brand drug manufacturer owes a duty of care to individuals who have never taken the drug actually manufactured by that company. Moreover, and most significantly, the plaintiffs have not convinced us that the state courts of Kentucky would adopt their vicarious-liability argument under the Kentucky Products Liability Act.