Ed Fanning comments on two landmark New Jersey Supreme Court rulings in Law360’s report “New Jersey Cases to Watch in 2019.”
Ed co-authored an amicus brief with David Kott and presented oral argument before the court in favor of adopting the Daubert factor-based approach for determining the admissibility of expert testimony. He describes the court’s In Re: Accutane decision to use the stricter federal standard as a guide when evaluating the reliability of expert testimony as a “game changer” for civil case law.
“New Jersey has now joined the mainstream—39 other states, the District of Columbia, and our federal courts—in using the Daubert factor-based approach to expert admissibility in civil cases. It requires that our trial judges be much more rigorous in their analysis and in their role as gatekeepers in excluding unproven and unreliable expert opinion testimony,” he told Law360.
The report also quotes Ed on another New Jersey Supreme Court ruling where McCarter also played a lead role. Ed Fanning and David Kott co-authored an amicus brief presented by David Kott before the court, which successfully argued that claims under New Jersey’s Truth-in-Consumer-Contract, Warranty and Notice Act (TCCWNA) should require that a plaintiff must suffer some adverse consequences to recover the $100 statutory TCCWNA penalty. Commenting on the Supreme Court’s ruling which held that, while illegal contract terms can be rendered unenforceable, they can’t trigger monetary relief unless customers were actually harmed, Ed said he has little doubt the federal appeals court will affirm the suits‘ dismissals. “This decision, thankfully, put the final nail in the coffin of these ridiculous no-injury TCCWNA cases,” he concluded.