Torts
No Preliminary Injunction Over Residents’ Claim That S.F. Failed to Adequately Police Tenderloin Sidewalks
From today's decision by Judge Jon Tigar (N.D. Cal.) in Roe v. City of S.F.: Plaintiffs are residents and businesses that live and operate in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco. {Plaintiffs seek to enjoin the…
No § 230 Immunity for Meta’s AI-Generated Ads
From Tuesday's decision by Chief Judge Richard Seeborg (N.D. Cal.) in Bouck v. Meta Platforms, Inc.: This case is the latest installment in an expanding genre: suits against social media companies for participating in…
Evidence of Plaintiff’s Suicide Excluded in Lawsuit Alleging Threats of Prosecution Aimed at Censoring His Posts About High School Girls’ Bathrooms
In anticipation of trial, defendants filed a motion in limine seeking to prohibit plaintiff from introducing evidence related to Shawn McBreairty's suicide. Because the general rule holds suicide as an independent…
Court Rejects $5M Lawsuit Over Teacher’s Saying High School Student Benefited from “White Privilege”
From Curtis v. Hawaii Mission Academy, decided Friday by the Hawaii Intermediate Court of Appeals (Judges Keith Hiraoka, Sonja McCullen, and Kimberly Guidry), I think correctly: The underlying facts of this case are largely…
A Second Round with William Barr on Litigation Over Interstate Pollution
After I responded with a letter to the editor to William Barr's Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that state-law-based tort suits against fossil fuel companies seeking redress for climate-related harms are preempted,…
Democratic National Committee Not Liable for Field Organizer’s Alleged “Grooming” of 16-Year-Old Campaign Volunteer, Which Led to Sex
From yesterday's decision by Judge Gerald Pappert (E.D. Pa.) in D.F. v. DNC Servs. Corp.: D.F. was a high school student in the summer of 2012 when she volunteered with Organizing for America, an arm of the Democratic…
Lawsuit Against Saudi Arabia Over Al-Shamrani Mass Shooting at Pensacola Naval Air Station Can Go Forward, in Part
From yesterday's Eleventh Circuit decision by Judge Stanley Marcus, joined by Judges Jill Pryor and Britt Grant, in Watson v. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia:This violent and tragic case arose out of a shooting rampage involving…
Placing Climate Tort Litigation in Context
Environmental law did not begin with enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. Nor did it begin when Massachusetts adopted the first state wetland protection statute in 1963 or California adopted the…
William Barr Discovers the Economics of Tort Law (and Misrepresents the Law Governing Interstate Pollution)
Last week, former Attorney General William P. Barr wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal purporting to expose a nefarious effort to impose a carbon tax through tort litigation. His op-ed is part of a broad effort to…
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