Drug & Device News

Writing that “[a] state has a strong interest in protecting its citizens from defective products, whether those products are toys that endanger children, tainted pharmaceutical drugs that harm patients, or workplace machinery that causes disabling injuries to employees,” Justice Barry Albin of the New Jersey Supreme Court announced in Nicastro v. McIntyre Machinery America Ltd, A-29-08, that product liability suits can be pursued in New Jersey state courts against foreign manufacturers whose only contact with the state is that one of their products is sold there through an independent distributor. All that is required to invoke this stream-of-commerce-based jurisdiction is for the foreign manufacturer to know of (or be reasonably be expected to have been aware of) the fact that its product would likely be distributed in the United States, to include the forum state of New Jersey.

The Nicastro case involved not a pharmaceutical product but an industrial machine, which severed a worker's fingers while he was on the job. However, the ruling opens the door for similar outcomes in medical device and pharmaceuticals litigations. Justice Albin, writing for the 5-2 majority in Nicastro, said that given the nature of modern international commerce and New Jersey's long-arm rule, there was no reason a foreign manufacturer should expect to be let off the hook just because its contacts with New Jersey are minimal. Wrote Albin, “The increasingly fast-paced globalization of the world economy has removed national borders as barriers to trade. Due process permits this State to provide a jurisdictional forum for its citizens who are injured by dangerous and defective products placed in the stream of commerce by a foreign manufacturer that has targeted a geographical market that includes New Jersey.”