The Star: “Says he should have stopped her from jumping out of car. A lawsuit launched by a woman who drunkenly jumped from a moving car during an argument with her partner could make drivers liable for intoxicated passengers who cause themselves harm.”
USA Today: “Fishermen and property owners along the Gulf Coast have filed hundreds of lawsuits since April against oil company BP and its contractors amid a legal landscape that has changed dramatically since the Exxon Valdez tanker spill sullied Alaska’s Prince William Sound 21 years ago.”
“There are an unbelievable array of issues in this case,” said Stanford law professor Jeffrey Fisher, who argued the Exxon Valdez case for the commercial fishermen and other Alaska businesses before the Supreme Court. “One of the most painful things about the Exxon case was that it took us 20 years to get the case finished and get the money in the pockets of the victims. One can’t help but wonder if the same thing is going to happen here.”
NY Daily News: “A California woman is suing Google after she was hit by a car while following directions provided by Google Maps on her cell phone . . . . Lauren Rosenberg says that the Google Maps BlackBerry application told her to use Deer Valley Drive — a highway also called Utah State Route 224 — to walk from one Park City address to another. However, the directions did not tell her that there were no sidewalks along Deer Valley Drive, which, Rosenberg alleges, led to her being struck by traffic.” Apparently the woman was too stupid to see and understand that there were no sidewalks on the road on which she was walking.
See “Google Maps Made Me Walk Onto the Highway, Woman Claims.”
Wired: “A former Pennsylvania high school student has sued school and county officials for damages in a controversial sexting case. . . . The complaint alleges that officials had no probable cause to seize and search her phone, and violated her privacy and her right to free expression by punishing her for storing nude and semi-nude photos of herself on her phone.”
The Volokh Conspiracy: “The case is White v. McKinley (8th Cir. May 17, 2010), and the damages award was $14 million in compensatory damages, $1 million in punitive damages against the plaintiff’s ex-wife, and $1 million in punitive damages against the police officer who was the ex-wife’s secret lover.”