Cameron Norris ’14 was a second-place award winner of the 2014 H. Thomas Austern Memorial Writing Competition, an annual competition held by the Food and Drug Law Institute that honors law students each year for scholarly writing dealing with areas of law that affect food and drugs.
Norris’ article, “Drugs, Devices and Discovery: Using Fee-Shifting to Resolve the Twombly/Iqbal Problem for Parallel Claims Under the FDCA,” was recognized in the competition’s “Short Papers” category and published in the Food and Drug Law Journal, a peer-reviewed journal co-produced with the Georgetown University Law Center.
Written for Professor Brian Fitzpatrick’s Advanced Litigation Seminar, Norris’ article contributes to an important debate in the field of civil justice: the true impact of two watershed Supreme Court decisions on the ability of plaintiffs to survive motions to dismiss and thus have an opportunity to gain important discovery from defendants. Norris finds that the plausibility pleading standard can prevent credible claims from being pursued where those claims are deemed parallel claims—state common-law claims based on violations of federal law. He then argues for a creative solution to this problem.
“Cameron is a careful and courageous thinker. I am so pleased and proud others will benefit from his work as much as I have,” Fitzpatrick said.
Norris is currently completing a term as a judicial clerk for Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2014-15 and will clerk for Judge William H. Pryor, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in 2015-16.
Norris’ article was a co-winner of Vanderbilt Law School’s 2014 Nagareda Award, which is sponsored by the Branstetter Program on Litigation and Dispute Resolution and recognizes graduating Vanderbilt law students for the best written work in the field of litigation and dispute resolution, along with another paper, “Surviving Mauritius: The Continued Vitality of Shareholder Class Actions,” written by J. Daniel Feltham ’14.