Recently in Injury & Tort Law Category

Drunk driver? Don't blame the underage suppliers.

This is the tale of five young girls, who did what many under-21 girls do: convinced strangers at a liquor store to buy them booze and helped supply a house party. (Think McLovin' from Superbad, only slightly more feminine.) Once the fun finished, the fabulous five hopped into a car, and soon thereafter, plowed into a bicyclist, who was severely injured. Along with his wife, he sought to sue not only the driver, but the four young ladies who provided the party favors.

Unfortunately for him, the California State Legislature was quite explicit in expressing its feelings on the subject.

After five years of legal wrangling, Perez Hilton (real name: Mario Lavandeira) has won an email privacy battle in arbitration, The Hollywood Reporter reports.

A disgruntled reader sued Perez after he published a nasty email she sent him, along with her name and unredacted email address. (Back in the day when we still read his site, Perez would occasionally publish these types of messages -- usually containing anti-gay rants -- under the heading "You Are an Idiot.") The sender, Diane Wargo, wanted Perez to cough up $25 million because she received threatening email messages and lost her job after he published the post.

That didn't go so well for her.

Last week, the California Supreme Court decided that Corporations Code Section 2010, which governs the winding-up and survival of dissolved corporations, does not apply to foreign corporations.

The case stemmed from Walter and Karen Greb's 2008 asbestos lawsuit against Diamond International Corporation and several other entities. Although Diamond had been dissolved for many years, the Grebs sought recovery from unexhausted liability insurance that covered Diamond during the decades when it did business in California.

The San Francisco Law Library filed a lawsuit this month against the City and County of San Francisco, alleging that officials are violating a City Charter provision that mandates proper funding and adequate space for the law library.

San Francisco has allegedly violated the charter provision since 1995.

Mixed-motive termination cases in California just got a little more interesting.

The California Supreme Court ruled last week that a jury in a mixed-motive case alleging unlawful termination should be instructed that it must find the employer's action was substantially motivated by discrimination before the burden shifts to the employer to make a same-decision showing, and that a same-decision showing precludes an award of reinstatement, backpay, or damages.

The California Supreme Court clarified this week that the theory of continuous accrual can be applied to unfair competition claims.

Jamshid Aryeh runs a copy business under the name ABC Copy & Print. Canon Business Solutions used to lease copiers to Aryeh. The leases required Aryeh to pay monthly rent for each copier, subject to a maximum copy allowance. Copies in excess of the monthly allowance required payment of an additional per copy charge.

Does a mandated reporter have a duty to report abuse when he's responsible for that abuse?

According to a recent decision from California's Fifth Appellate District Court, the Fifth Amendment trumps the mandatory reporting law.

Last week, the California Supreme Court concluded that the primary assumption of risk doctrine, though most frequently applied to sports, applies to bumper car rides.

The court further concluded that an amusement park's limited duty of care under the primary assumption of risk doctrine -- the duty not to unreasonably increase the risk of injury over and above that inherent in the low-speed collisions essential to bumper car rides -- did not extend to preventing head-on collisions between the cars.

Song Koo Lee owns and operates the K&D Market in San Francisco's Mission District. He does not own the building, but has operated the market since 1985.

Les Jankey, a wheelchair user, sued Lee for denying him and other similarly-situated disabled persons access to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services offered by K&D Market. Jankey claimed that a four-inch step located at the entry of the market was an architectural barrier that prevented him and other wheelchair-bound individuals from wheeling into the store, asserting violations of the federal ADA, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, the Disabled Persons Act, and the Health and Safety Code.

When a Facebook user 'likes' a product or company, or posts something related to a product or company, Facebook sometimes presents those likes or posts to other users in that person's network as a paid promotion for the product or company. Facebook had a cyber snafu last year after California users complained that their images were being used to promote products without their permission through 'Sponsored Stories' posts.

The users sued, arguing that California's right of publicity laws prohibit the social network from using a person's image to promote a product without the person's consent.