Thomas Knowlton, Litigation Division
Tom Knowlton received his B.A. degree in Mathematics, cum laude, in 1981 from Williams College and his law degree, magna cum laude, in 1989 from Boston College Law School. Before attending law school, Tom taught Math and Latin at the Roxbury Latin School in Boston, Massachusetts. After law school, Tom clerked for the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and then worked at the Boston law firm of Hill & Barlow.
Tom has worked in the Attorney General s Office since 1994. In January 2021, Attorney General Aaron Frey promoted Tom to Deputy Attorney General and Chief of the Litigation Division. Tom has argued more than 30 cases in the Maine Law Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, including:
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Last week, in
Dunn v. Genzyme,[1] the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) provided clarification as to the pleading standard that applies to state product liability claims against medical device manufacturers. Under
Riegel v. Medtronic,[2] such claims survive federal preemption under the Medical Device Amendments (MDA) of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, so long as the state claims parallel (and do not supplement or conflict with) federal law.
But courts have reached conflicting results as to whether the alleged “parallel” violation of federal law must be pleaded with specificity. Some courts require detailed pleading where they will dismiss a complaint unless the plaintiff “allege[s] that the defendant violated a particular federal specification relating to the device at issue.”[3] Other courts are more lenient, where they do not require that plaintiffs “specify the precise defect or specific federal regulatory requirements that were allegedly violated.”[4]
To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog:
Massachusetts has a similar negligence standard to Connecticut but has different laws as applied to landowners in snow and ice liability cases. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) abolished the distinction between natural and unnatural accumulations of snow and ice in premises liability cases, abolishing the prior standard whereby owners of land could not be found liable for any natural accumulations of snow and ice.
Papadopoulos v. Target Corp., 457 Mass. 368 (2010). After
Papadopoulos, Massachusetts courts “apply to hazards arising from snow and ice the same obligation that a property owner owes to lawful visitors as to all other hazards: a duty to ‘act as a
3:47
Frustrated by what they see as a lack of progress in reforming the police department, activists in Springfield, Massachusetts want the U.S. Department of Justice to step back in.
The Springfield chapter of the NAACP and the Pioneer Valley Project want the Department of Justice and the city to come to a settlement that could result in a federal judge overseeing reforms of the Springfield Police Department.
The only way we can have any confidence they are going to implement police reforms that bring about accounability in this city is if they are under a consent decree and so we call on the Department of Justice to move in that direction, said Bishop Talbert Swan, president of the Springfield NAACP chapter.