All lawyers, including appellate lawyers, rely on law books. Whether or not we still actually flip pages, we all use them to research questions of law and procedure. We are only human, and that goes for legal authors and editors, as it does for the rest of us. So what happens to us—us being appellate lawyers—when the book is wrong? The answer appears to be that we, the lawyers, are out of luck.

The seriousness of this issue was underscored recently in the unreported Superior Court decision, Beltz v. Ethicon Women’s Health & Urology, No. 2138 EDA 2017, 2018 WL 6715736 (Pa. Super. Dec. 21, 2018) (memorandum). In Beltz, a Philadelphia jury awarded almost $2.5 million for claimed medical device-related injuries, after (among other things) the trial court allowed a strict liability claim in direct contravention of Superior Court precedent, see Creazzo v. Medtronic, 903 A.2d 24, 31 (Pa. Super. 2006).