Court Opinion

ID: 9479448
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:19:01.075562+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:03.151548
License: Public Domain

REAVLEY, Circuit Judge,
with whom POLITZ, KING, JOHNSON, WILLIAMS and HIGGINBOTHAM, Circuit Judges, join dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:
If the court, by refusing to rehear en banc, approves the panel’s application of Boeing Co. v. Shipman, 411 F.2d 365 (5th Cir.1969), I wonder what is left in this circuit of the Boeing rule or, for that matter, the Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury.
Six highly qualified and experienced experts testified that bendectin is a human teratogen, i.e. capable of causing human birth defects. Three of them testified to the opinion that bendectin was a cause of Rachel Brock’s deformation. Their opinions of causation were not the product of faulty syllogisms but were predicated upon medical study and research and upon their explanation of the process by which the doxylamine element in bendectin can interfere with the development of nerve cells in an embryo. The panel picks at details in the testimony lacking expert consensus, but its characterization of this voluminous expert proof as “speculation” could just as well doom virtually all expert testimony. The panel reaches its climax with the novel declaration that only epidemiological studies can prove causal relation between ben-dectin and birth defects, and it enters into the debate with Dr. Glasser on the statistical significance of the Heinonen study. In the absence of expert consensus must we now always await population studies before a jury verdict may be based upon medical opinion? So says the panel, at least for bendectin cases. This, despite the testimony here that case reports and laboratory research reveal teratogens and that no epidemiological study has ever discovered a teratogen.
The panel tries to draw support from Richardson by Richardson v. Richardson-Merrell, Inc., 857 F.2d 823 (D.C.Cir.1988), but that court ruled that the plaintiff’s medical expert lacked an adequate basis, of the type reasonably relied upon by experts in his field, for his opinion, which left no support for the verdict. That record was a far cry from the one we are called upon to review here. Though it tinkers with bits of the extensive expert testimony in this record, our panel does not purport to hold that the foundation for the opinions of these experts fails to satisfy Federal Rule of Evidence 703.
We dissent.