On a June Monday, lawyers in a trial over Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder scrambled to explain to a St. Louis judge whether a U.S. Supreme Court decision handed down that morning doomed their case.
One attorney was still downloading the opinion to his computer. Another told the judge he was “literally on my cellphone trying to learn facts,” according to a recently released transcript of the hearing. Yet defense attorneys assured 22nd Circuit Court Judge Rex Burlison that the Supreme Court decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court, which limited where defendants could be sued, threw “a monkey wrench” into the case and had disrupted matters so thoroughly that he could do nothing less than grant a mistrial.
