Recently in Injury & Tort Law Category

The First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an $11 million donation to the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center last Tuesday.

The decision didn’t come easily, though, as the judges expressed their concern with the idea that they were called on to determine the ultimate disposition of settlement funds in the underlying case.

As Anonymous continues hacking websites and teaching the online world lessons in Internet security, more consumers will receive disconcerting email messages from businesses saying, "We're sorry, but your personal information stored on our website has been compromised."

When we learn that a website which contains our personal information doesn't meet proper Internet security standards, we have the same reaction as Brenda Katz, today's First Circuit Court of Appeals appellee: We wanted to hold someone accountable.

It was an offer the Feds couldn’t refuse: million-dollar judgments for the families of murdered mob victims.

Upholding a lower court’s ruling, the First Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the federal government to compensate the victims of James “Whitey” Bulger and his associate Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi. The First Circuit held that the FBI had shown “negligence of a wildly reckless flavor” in protecting them from criminal protection because they were federal informants.

If you shop online, you’ve probably received an email from a retailer or your credit card company explaining that their system was hacked, and your personal information may have been accessed.

That warning is always followed by an attempt to reassure you that your credit card information is probably safe.

If you are overcome with the litigious spirit every time you read one of those infuriating messages - we have received three in the last year - the First Circuit Court of Appeals is willing to consider your data breach lawsuit based on Maine state law claims.

Does the U.S. government ever use mobster informants like Swedish government did in the Stieg Larsson Trilogy?

The answer is yes. And much like Larrson’s Zalachenko, those informants can be difficult to control.

In February, the First Circuit Court of Appeals struck an $8.4 million judgment against the U.S. government under the Federal Tort Claims Act after finding that the plaintiffs, survivors of a government informant’s victims, failed to timely file their complaint.

We like to build things, but we don't have a table saw. When we need wood cut, we let the hardware store do it for us. On one such occasion, a store employee cut his hand on the saw while cutting our laminate shelving. There was a lot of blood. It was awful.

How does this relate to the First Circuit Court of Appeals? Defective design litigation.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued upheld a $1.5 million jury award in a negligence and implied warranty of merchantability case involving a table saw.

Here's a really sad personal injury and wrongful death lawsuit, which was appealed in the First Circuit Court of Appeals. The case involved the death of a child in a power-mower accident.

In this sad story, the father, Kevin O'Neil, accidentally backed over his two-and-a-half year old son with an Exectrolux lawn mower.

The young boy's parents filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the parties responsible for the power-mower, including those responsible for manufacture, design and marketing of the mower.

ROTC officer's civil rights suit against a university for injuries during a student protest

Melendez-Garcia v. Sanchez, 08-2530, concerned a challenge to the district court's grant of defendants' motion for summary judgment on the federal-law claims and dismissal of the state-law claims, in plaintiff's suit against various university officials pursuant to 42 U.S.C. section 1983 and Puerto Rican state laws, claiming that they failed to protect him from injury during a student protest at a university.