A Florida jury tacked on $50 million in punitive damages to a roughly $211 million award to the family of Maya Kowalski, the child at the center of the Netflix documentary “Take Care of Maya,” against Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital for mistreating Maya to the point that her mother took her own life. Read […]
When I was a young lawyer, jurors were not routinely allowed to ask their own questions of witnesses. When the jury instructions and other trial rules were modified to make this a regular feature of trials, most of us came to believe that juror questions were an important and useful change to the way trials […]
My favorite football coach is famous for his mantra: “The standard is the standard”. In court, however, proving negligence often depends upon establishing a “standard of care” that may be vague. In medical malpractice cases, expert witnesses often testify to a national minimum standard 0f care that applies in all communities. In this interesting Florida […]
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present … fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. Abraham Lincoln (1862), on the imperative of winning the Civil War
Knowledge is in every Country the surest basis of public happiness. George Washington (1790), urging the pursuit of science in his first address on the State of the Union.
Rumbustious Part of speech: adjective Origin: British English, late 18th century Boisterous or unruly.
This Holiday means a lot to me. I spend a lot of time thinking about all of the wrongful death clients I have had the privilege to represent. I think of the dead and the families left behind. I think of the countless hours spent meeting with the families in the immediate aftermath and years […]
In many states, including Florida, a physical impact is required for a plaintiff to recover mental and emotional damages for most torts. There are exceptions for the most egregious misconduct – when some people without any physical impact can recover mental and emotional damages. I have litigated that question successfully on appeal. You can read […]
Exhortation An address or communication emphatically urging someone to do something.
In Florida, there is a presumption that the driver of a vehicle that rear-ends another is at fault. That presumption may be overcome by evidence of a sudden stop, sudden entry into traffic or cutting off traffic. Given that, you might rightly wonder why the carrier of the sand truck in this recent case in […]
