Well, the good people of SCOTUS just wrapped up their term and now get a nice long summer vacation. (Or a long rest-of-life vacation, if you’re Justice Souter.) But nurse & lawyer are still hard at work! Of the 83 cases decided by the Supreme Court this term, these lucky 7 addressed health care-type issues. For the next week, Lawyer will review one case each day with a brief summary and an even briefer opinion!

Wyeth v. Levine: Oooh, remember this one from the early days of Nurse & Lawyer? The question was whether a drug company could be sued for damage caused by the on-label use of an approved drug. (In other words, for insufficient warnings on the label.) The drug company says that being FDA-approved should give them protection. But the patient – who lost an arm, by the way, to a gnarly infection — prevailed! The FDA requirements represent a MINIMUM – and are not sufficient to get the manufacturer off the hook.

Lawyer says: Patient Protection Win!