Recently in Injury & Tort Law Category

Everyone who's attended or worked for UC Berkeley is accustomed to the regular protests conducted on campus. Every day brings a new cause, a new chant, and new protest signs. But only groups like the Occupy Wall Street movement take their crusades to the next level and try to set up camp.

After one Occupy group pitched their tents on Berkeley's campus in 2011, university police used tactics the protestors claimed amounted to excessive force. After years of duking it out in court, a panel of federal judges ruled in favor of the campus cops, although the protestors are prepared to take the case to the Supreme Court if necessary.

There's no denying college and graduate school can be an intensely stressful experience at times. Between exams, papers, projects, and just fitting in, it's a lot for students to handle, especially if mixed with other mental health issues. And in tragic cases, these can be so great the individual turns to suicide.

Of course, after such a devastating event, many wonder why it happened or how it could have been prevented. In a case out of Massachusetts, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts has ruled that although a college and its professors were not responsible for a student's suicide, colleges and professors may have a duty to prevent suicide in some cases.

The feud between Uber and Lyft continues with no end in sight. And that's normally a good thing for ride-sharing consumers, because strong competition usually drives prices down. But according to one man's lawsuit, Uber used a wiretap program to lure drivers away from Lyft, increasing Lyft customer wait times, and encouraging them to call an Uber instead. However, a federal judge has mostly dismissed the man's lawsuit, ruling that his allegations don't satisfy the federal Wiretap Act.

When an adult seriously harms a child, the full force of the law should come down on them. And when a series of adults could have easily prevented that harm, they should be held responsible for that abhorrent negligence. These are, after all, the lives of innocent children we're talking about.

In a truly shocking case, Oregon child welfare workers ignored clear warning signs and placed a four-year-old girl with a man who later allegedly raped and abused her. And now the state agency has agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit brought on her behalf, while her former foster father is a free man.

No one really enjoys having to go to work, so it's especially upsetting if you get injured while at work. Luckily, most employers have workers' compensation insurance. But, you may wonder, which injuries qualify for workers' compensation? And, are all types of businesses required to provide workers' compensation? Well, as it always seems to be when it comes to the law, the answer is: it depends. In Oklahoma, for example, only recently did the Oklahoma Supreme Court decide that workers can sue oil companies for injuries suffered while working.

Starbucks customers are pretty fussy when it comes to their daily fix. That much was evidenced by fans of their lattes filing a class action lawsuit claiming the coffee chain was shorting them on their steamed milk. "Starbucks lattes are uniformly underfilled pursuant to a standardized recipe," the suit alleged. "By underfilling its lattes, thereby shortchanging its customers, Starbucks has saved countless millions of dollars in the cost of goods sold and was unjustly enriched by taking payment for more product than it delivers."

But a federal judge disagreed, ruling that the lawsuit "fail[ed] to show that lattes contain less than the promised beverage volume represented on Starbucks' menu boards," and dismissing the suit.

There are times when a person's immigration status will be relevant in a court of law. Say, if a person is accused of falsifying documents to hide that status. It could also come up if a witness is receiving some immigration benefit in exchange for or in order to facilitate their testimony. In an on-the-job personal injury case? Immigration status is not so relevant.

So said the Washington Supreme Court back in 2010, when it granted an injured worker a new trial on the grounds the jury in his first may have been prejudiced by knowledge that the man had overstayed his visa. Last week, the court officially adopted that rule of evidence, making immigration status "generally inadmissible" in both civil and criminal court.

'The normal expectations of the participants in a school sponsored educational trip abroad involving minor children supported the imposition of a duty on the defendant to warn about and to protect against serious insect-borne diseases in the areas to be visited on the trip.'

Most of that is pretty standard stuff: we want schools to adequately warn students and parents about the dangers they might encounter on a field trip. It's the "serious insect-borne diseases" part that gives one pause. And it should -- that disease was tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, contracted by a 15-year-old boarding school student in northeast China. And the full quote was from Connecticut Supreme Court Chief Justice Chase T. Rogers, upholding a $41.7 million verdict against the school for failing to inform her that the U.S. Center for Disease Control had issued a warning to protect against the disease in the exact area where the students would travel.

There's no doubt our smartphones can be distracting. There's no doubt that distracted driving is dangerous, even deadly. And there's no doubt smartphones, or at least some alerts, could be disabled while we're driving. So does not automatically disabling distracting smartphone functions while we're driving mean that smartphone manufacturers are liable for distracted driving accidents?

Not according to a California Superior Court in Santa Clara, California. The father of a man killed by an 18 year old who was texting and driving, sued Apple, claiming the company knew the dangers of texting and driving, possessed a "lock-out mechanism" capable of disabling functions like texting while someone is driving, and failed to provide the feature for users. But the court dismissed the lawsuit, saying Apple's role in the accident was far too attenuated" to be legally responsible for the death.

Shakespeare was wrong. A rose by any other name might still smell as sweet, unless that name is pink slime. Then, there's a good chance consumers would never know what it smells like because no one smells pink slime.

Do you remember the news reports about "pink slime" that made the local news circuit back in 2012? How could anyone forget right? Finding out that over half the nation's ground beef contained pink slime was eye opening. But the phrase pink slime didn't win any friends over at Beef Products Inc. who were the ones skewered by the report. Instead, it led to the company hiring some lawyers, filing suit, and winning a sizable settlement from Disney and ABC news.