The primary insurer for a Colorado climbing gear company said an excess insurer’s bid to get out of liability for a climber’s injuries should be heard in a Washington state malpractice suit, arguing in a motion that the policy dispute is “intertwined” with lawyer misconduct in the underlying product liability case.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/articles/1787996?e_id=25d2963f-1ea0-460a-a386-3cba85706e60&utm_source=engagement-alerts&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=similar_articles?copied=1

Here are links to just a few of the cases in which I fought through coverage issues to obtain full recoveries for my clients:

Owens v. Nationwide

Signorelli v. Fireman’s Fund

Bethany Morris

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The post The Way My Mother Tells The Story appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

For instance, I have litigated cases concerning who qualifies as a survivor under Florida’s Wrongful Death Act. I have also litigated changes in the law that allowed new kinds of claims but prohibited some families from taking advantage of changes in the law.

Here’s one that you would have thought would have been decided long ago.

The widow of a mesothelioma victim told the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday that an appellate court erred when it shoehorned a requirement into the state’s Wrongful Death Act mandating that a surviving spouse be married to a victim before the victim’s injury.

Read more at: https://www.law360.com/personal-injury-medical-malpractice/articles/1717604?nl_pk=029cff45-637f-44e3-babf-75563f8e0bfd&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=personal-injury-medical-malpractice&utm_content=2023-09-07&read_main=1&nlsidx=0&nlaidx=5?copied=1

The post Florida’s Wrongful Death Act: Still Being Interpreted After All These Years appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

Right actions for the future are the best apologies for wrong ones in the past.

Tryon Edwards, theologian

The post Today’s Quote appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

The post Today’s Quote: Emerson said reading him caused a “tingling in the blood.” appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

The post A sentence ends in an appeal. What’s so funny about that? appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

That assessment has become increasingly true. The U.S. has diverged over the past decade from other comparably developed countries, where traffic fatalities have been falling. This American exception became even starker during the pandemic. In 2020, as car travel plummeted around the world, traffic fatalities broadly fell as well. But in the U.S., the opposite happened. Travel declined, and deaths still went up. Preliminary federal data suggests road fatalities rose again in 2021.

New York Times

The post Why Are Traffic Fatalities Going Up in The US and Nowhere Else? appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local news events. Rising from its humble beginnings as a print newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.

So begins the satirical and brilliant defense of Anthony Novak before the Supreme Court of the United States. Judges sometimes have a go at wry humor when they write opinions. Not as often, lawyers might bravely venture into humor – intentionally or otherwise. Rarely do you see the kind of full-tilt onslaught of parody used by The Onion’s lawyers in their ‘friend of the court’ offering.

The Onion files this brief to protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality. As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.

This tradition has modern practitioners like David Sedaris, Carl Hiassen, PJ O’Rourke, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mike Royko. The tradition dates all the way back to Jonathan Swift, Moliere, and the ancient Greeks.

And no argument before SCOTUS on free speech would be complete without reference to pornography precedent. From the Brief,

The point of all this is not that it is funny when deluded figures of authority mistake satire for the actual news—even though that can be extremely funny. Rather, it’s that the parody allows these figures to puncture their own sense of self-importance by falling for what any reasonable person would recognize as an absurd escalation of their own views. In the political context, the effect can be particularly pronounced. See Hustler Mag., Inc. v. Falwell, 485 U.S. 46, 53–55 (1988); see also Falwell v. Flynt, 805 F.2d 484, 487 (4th Cir. 1986) (Wilkinson, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing) (“Nothing is more thoroughly democratic than to have the high-and-mighty lampooned and spoofed.”).

I also love that one of the few citations in the brief is to a case involving the country music or songwriting publishing company, Acuff Rose.

And the latter portion of the Brief contains this hopeful note.

And the “reasonable reader” is “ ‘no dullard. He or she does not represent the lowest common denominator, but reasonable intelligence and learning. He or she can tell the difference between satire and sincerity.’ ” New Times, Inc. v. Isaacks, 146 S.W.3d 144, 157 (Tex. 2004) (quoting Patrick v. Sup. Ct., 27 Cal. Rptr. 2d 883, 887 (Ct. App. 1994)). “Nor is the reasonable person some totally humorless drudge who cannot perceive the presence of subtle invective.” Patrick, 27 Cal. Rptr. 2d at 887. Instead, the reasonable reader’s perspective “is more informed by an assessment of her well-considered view than by her immediate yet transitory reaction,” particularly “in light of the special characteristics of satire,” which leverage that transitory reaction for rhetorical effect. Farah, 736 F.3d at 536.

Congratulations to the authors Mssr’s Stempvoort and Portinga – and The Onion – on a job well done.

Here is the link:

The Onion’s SCOTUS Brief

The post Yes, The Onion’s SCOTUS Brief Is Hysterical. And Brilliant. appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

There’s nothing like a toe-tapper about a mass casualty event. When it comes down to it, that’s all the blues are about: making the insufferable thing bearable. In High Water Everywhere, Charley Patton sang about the 1927 Mississippi levee break that displaced tens of thousands. Patton lived on Dockery’s Plantation near Greenville, Mississippi, where the Army Corps of Engineers built a system of earthen wall barriers designed to control the Mississippi River. In the spring of 1927, the River flooded. The levee groaned before failing. Greenville residents are described as watching from the streets below as riverboats floated high above them on the topped levees of the cresting river before it broke. In many parts, the disaster was slow-moving. The muddy wall of water (described by some as seven feet high) moved across bottom land at a pace of fourteen miles a day. In the tense aftermath of the flood, riots and violence broke out between whites and blacks – who felt impressed into service of the recovery efforts and were forced into centralized tent camps that may have felt more like prison or slave camps.

None of this is mentioned in Patton’s song High Water Everywhere, but the feeling of dread, chaos, and confusion that permeated the Mississippi low country in early 1927 surely comes through. The blues idiom is like that – simultaneously and intensely personal and universal, putting the singer at the very center of a universally appreciated narrative of difficulty and sometimes tragedy.

Backwater at Blytheville, backed up all around
Backwater at Blytheville, done took Joiner town
It was fifty families and children come to sink and drown

The water was risin’ up at my friend’s door
The water was risin’ up at my friend’s door
The man said to his women folk, “Lord, we’d better go”

The post High Water Everywhere appeared first on The Thompson Law Firm.

Iron-clad feather-feet pounding the dust
An October’s day, towards evening
Sweat embossed veins standing proud to the plough
Salt on a deep chest seasoning

Last of the line at an honest day’s toil
Turning the deep sod under
Flint at the fetlock, chasing the bone
Flies at the nostrils plunder.

The Suffolk, the Clydesdale, the Percheron vie
With the Shire on his feathers floating
Hauling soft timber into the dusk

To bed on a warm straw coating.

Heavy Horses, move the land under me
Behind the plough gliding — slipping and sliding free

Now you’re down to the few
And there’s no work to do
The tractor’s on its way.

Let me find you a filly for your proud stallion seed
To keep the old line going.
And we’ll stand you abreast at the back of the wood
Behind the young trees growing

To hide you from eyes that mock at your girth,
And your eighteen hands at the shoulder
And one day when the oil barons have all dripped dry
And the nights are seen to draw colder

They’ll beg for your strength, your gentle power
Your noble grace and your bearing
And you’ll strain once again to the sound of the gulls
In the wake of the deep plough, sharing.

Standing like tanks on the brow of the hill
Up into the cold wind facing
In stiff battle harness, chained to the world

Against the low sun racing
Bring me a wheel of oaken wood
A rein of polished leather
A Heavy Horse and a tumbling sky

Brewing heavy weather.

Bring a song for the evening
Clean brass to flash the dawn
Across these acres glistening
Like dew on a carpet lawn
In these dark towns folk lie sleeping
As the heavy horses thunder by
To wake the dying city
With the living horseman’s cry
At once the old hands quicken —
Bring pick and wisp and curry comb —
Thrill to the sound of all
The heavy horses coming home.

Jethro Tull, Heavy Horses

RIP QE2.

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