tort law

The Stanford Law Review has an interesting essay from University of Iowa College of Law Professor Maya Steinitz suggesting that there should be an international court of civil justice. Steinitz reasons the civil equivalent for a International Criminal Court would be just for plaintiffs and efficient for corporate defendants. She notes that there is no forum for cross-border torts after the Supreme Court ruled in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. that the Alien Tort Claims Act presumptively does not apply extraterritorially and closed American courts to most cross-border mass torts. "The core reason the problem of the missing forum is deeply troubling is, of course, that it creates an access-to-justice deficit. ... In addition to injustice to individual tort victims, the lack of deterrence leads to a tremendous wealth transfer from the developing to the developed world; the world’s most disempowered constitu­encies internalize the costs of the economic activities of the world’s wealthiest corporations," Steinitz argues.

The families of 20 first-graders killed by Adam Lanza at a Connecticut elementary school have sued the manufacturer of the military assault rifle used in the school shooting, Bloomberg's Phil Milford and Christian Dolmetsch reports. Lawyers for the families said in a statement that the Bushmaster Firearms International LLC rifle was specifically designed for combat, not for defending one's home or for hunting.

Milford and Dolmetsch report that the complaint alleges "Bushmaster knew or should have known that selling assault rifles to civilians posed an 'unreasonable and egregious' risk of injury to others."

The lawsuit also names names "Camfor, a firearm wholesaler, and Riverview Gun Sales, the East Windsor store where the gun was purchased by Lanza's mother, Nancy," the Connecticut Law Tribune reported. Lanza also killed his mother with the gun before killing 20 children, six adults and himself at the Sandy Hook Elementary School.
 

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that federal evidentiary rules bar the use of statements made during jury deliberations, so a South Dakota man can't get a new personal injury trial over his motorcycle accident because of comments made by the jury forewoman during deliberations, the Washington Post's Robert Barnes reports. The forewoman allegedly said that her daughter had been at fault in a fatal accident and would have had her life ruined if she had been sued. The plaintiff alleged that the juror lied about her impartiality.

Parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school shooting two years ago have filed wrongful death claim notices on the behalf of their children, the Hartford Courant's Dave Altimari reports. Filing the notice does not mean that the parents will definitely proceed with lawsuits, and no defendants are filed in the notice. But Altimari indicates that "sources said several families met over the weekend with lawyers from Koskoff, Koskoff & Bieder, a Bridgeport law firm, to discuss a potential lawsuit against Bushmaster, the North Carolina-based manufacturer of the Bushmaster AR 15 that Adam Lanza used to kill 20 first-graders and six adults on Dec. 14, 2012." Other lawyers are considering a lawsuit against the town of Newtown or its school board regarding the secuirty at the school or suing the estate of Nancy Lanza, the mother of Adam Lanza.

The Missouri Supreme Court has struck down a $500,000 cap against some punitive damages, the Kansas City Star's Mark Morris reports. The court ruled in the case of a $1 million verdict awarded to a woman defrauded by a car dealer: "The Supreme Court restored the judgment because [the plaintiff] had filed her claim as a common law fraud, which has existed in Missouri since the first state constitution was written. Because of that, the legislature cannot limit a jury’s ability to set punitive damage amounts, the court ruled in a unanimous decision," Morris further reports. The cap remains in place for causes of action created by the legislature but not for those developed through the common law before the 1820 adoption of Missouri's first constitution.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard oral argument this week on the constitutionality of a $500,000 damages cap for plaintiffs injured by municipal defendants, The Legal Intelligencer's Max Mitchell reports. Plaintiffs attorney Tom Kline urged the justices to overturn prior precedent that allowed a statutory cap on damages against political subdivisions.

There have been more positive developments this week in favor of same-sex marriage and LGBT rights:

One, Virginia's ban on same-sex marriage was struck down, Christian Science Monitor reports. The ruling is the first in the south to overturn a voter-backed prohibition on same-sex matrimony as unconstitutional.

Two, the Associated Press reports that a federal judge ruled this week that Kentucky must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. The judge struck down the clause on recognizing out-of-state same-sex matrimony as imposing a traditional or faith-based limitation without a sufficient justification for it, the AP also reports.

Three, the Southern Poverty Law Center has filed a lawsuit challenging Alabama's same-sex marriage ban, the Washington Blade reports. The issue involves a same-sex couple in which one spouse was killed in a car accident and his widower is barred from receiving the majority of any settlement money in a wrongful death action. Opposite-sex spouses get that privilege in Alabama.

ProPublica reports on a little-covered problem: some people harmed by medical malpractice can't find any attorneys to take their cases.

This is a phenomenon that many plaintiffs lawyers told me about when I was regularly reporting on medical-malpractice litigation for The Legal Intelligencer. Med mal cases are very expensive to work up because they require expert witnesses and scientific-oriented discovery, and many firms will not take cases in which the injury is less catastrophic or their are low economic damages because the return on investing in the case is so low.

ProPublica reports on the "problem faced by many who are harmed in a medical setting: Attorneys refuse their cases, not because the harm didn’t happen but because the potential economic damages are too low." This includes the elderly who have low incomes because they are retired, because their medical bills are picked up by Medicare and they typically have no dependents, ProPublica further reports.

Grist, an online environmental magazine, speculates whether the 90 companies that have been identified as causing two-thirds of human-driven global warming emissions could be sued under tort law. Environmental law experts told Grist that such lawsuits would fail in federal court. The U.S. Supreme Court found in American Elecctric Power v. Connecticut that states can't sue companies for emitting greenhouse gases. Only the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate interstate CO2 pollution because the federal Clean Air Act displaces federal common law, Grist reports. State lawsuits wouldn't be pre-empted, but it would require proving specific causation, Grist reports: "Let’s say your house was damaged by a hurricane. You would have to convince a judge and jury that the specific hurricane was caused by climate change. Just because climate change makes storms stronger and more frequent doesn’t mean you can blame oil companies for any given storm in a court of law."