Approved Opinions for the Week of August 28, 2017

26-2-4108 Montclair State University v. County of Passaic, et al. N.J. Super. App. Div. (Rothstadt, J.A.D.) (11 pp.) In Rutgers v. Piluso, 60 N.J. 142 (1972), the Supreme Court addressed the limits of a local government’s authority to regulate on-site construction on a state university’s property that was confined to its campus. In this dispute, the court was asked to determine whether those limits apply to a state university’s construction of a roadway that intersects with an off-site local road. The court held that the state university was not required to obtain local land use approval for the project because the limits imposed by Rutgers applied equally to the proposed development in this case. (Approved for Publication)

59-8-4101 In re: Lipitor Antitrust Litig., 3rd Cir. (Smith, J.) (106 pp.) Plaintiffs, a putative class of director purchasers, end payors, and individual retailers of pharmaceuticals, appealed from the dismissal of their complaints concerning 2 drugs, Lipitor and Effexor XR, in which plaintiffs alleged that defendants, the companies holding the patents to those drugs, fraudulently procured and enforced their patents and entered into monopolistic settlement agreements with potential manufacturers of generic versions of the drugs. Specifically, plaintiffs alleged that defendants entered “reverse payment settlement agreements” that the Court subjected to antitrust scrutiny in F.T.C. v. Actavis, Inc., 133 S. Ct. 2223. The district court dismissed plaintiffs’ reverse payment settlement agreement claim upon finding that their allegations were not plausible; the district court further held that plaintiffs failed to plead plausible allegations that the Lipitor patents were fraudulently procured and enforced. On appeal, the court reversed the dismissal of plaintiffs’ claims. The court first held that plaintiffs plausibly alleged unlawful reverse payment settlement agreements since the release of the generic Lipitor manufacturer’s potential liability far exceeded any saved litigation cost, permitting a plausible inference that the settlement was an inducement to ensure a longer period of monopoly based on patents that defendants believed were at risk of being found invalid or not infringed. The court held that the Actavis standard did not require the specific valuation pleading demanded by the district court, and held that the burden was on defendants to justify large reverse payment settlements. Similarly, for Effexor, the court found that the generic manufacturer received hundreds of millions of dollars in value in exchange for delaying introduction of generic Effexor, off which defendants profited by billions. Finally, the court held that plaintiffs plausibly pled fraudulent procurement and enforcement of Lipitor patents by alleging that defendants submitted false or misleading data to obtain the patent. (Precedential) [Filed August 21, 2017]