Yesterday’s verdict in the second Vioxx lawsuit to reach a jury injects some much-needed good sense into the swirling litigation surrounding the arthritis drug. A postal employee from Idaho, Frederick “Mike” Humeston, had argued that using Vioxx for two months in 2001 had caused the heart attack he suffered in September of that year. Lawyers for the drug’s manufacturer, Merck, countered that Mr. Humeston had suffered from a long list of ailments for a long time and had not taken Vioxx long enough to have been at a risk for the cardiac side effects studies had uncovered. After eight hours of deliberation, a jury in New Jersey state court credited the pharmaceutical company’s view.

The case leaves Merck with one win and one loss in Vioxx suits, after a Texas jury awarded a plaintiff more than a quarter of a billion dollars in August. Aside from the fact that this is only the second suit to reach a verdict, it is hard to discern any long-term trends. Mr. Humeston is still alive, while the Texas case involved the death of a Vioxx user, Robert Ernst. Mr. Humeston’s medical history is also more checkered than Mr. Ernst’s was. And Mr. Humeston appears to have taken Vioxx more infrequently over a shorter period.

Yet there are several encouraging signals to be read in this decision, according to a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has written on the issue for these pages before, John Calfee. The jury found that Merck was not liable for charges of failing to warn patients of the dangers of Vioxx. This could prove a more significant finding than any judgment on what actually caused Mr. Humeston’s heart attack, since most lawsuits focus on the supposed inadequacy of Merck’s warnings.

In a similar vein, the jury appears to have been unswayed by the many internal e-mails, generally alarmist, which the plaintiff used to try to show that Merck executives had known they were selling a dangerous product. Mr. Calfee notes that memos like this show a vigorous quality control process at work. This verdict holds out hope that juries will not allow attempts by tort lawyers to turn such correspondence against a company to have a chilling effect on important corporate deliberations.

Finally, Merck obtained a favorable verdict even though many observers had suggested that the judge, Carol Higbee, appeared to be biased against the company when she excluded some key evidence the defense tried to introduce. The jury found for Merck even though it was never allowed to hear evidence, for example, that some executives and their family members themselves had used Vioxx until the day it was withdrawn from the market.

Merck isn’t out of the woods yet by a long shot, but this outcome suggests that it might have been wise to take the risk of fighting all of these cases instead of settling them. The next case goes to trial in a few weeks in a federal court in Houston. Meantime, even as the tort system continues spiraling out of control, this verdict is a reminder that the tort bar hasn’t completely won.