The Law of Bodily Injury

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Personal Injury ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Bodily Injury ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Tort Litigation

Chapter 7 examines the personal injury suits that formed almost half of the civil suits between black and white litigants in eight state supreme courts from 1900 to 1920. Facing terrible pain and loss in the wake of their own or loved one’s injuries, some African Americans turned to the courts to gain damages. There, in a time of encroaching segregation and racial injustice, a number of black litigants found disproportionate success in the realm of tort litigation. During their trials, black litigants shaped their testimony to meet the legal basis of personal injury, emphasizing their own caution at the time of the accident, their continuing pain and weakness from the injury, and the loss of income they had incurred. As in fraud cases, their claims of weakness and vulnerability could reinforce white judges’ and jury members’ ideas about racial inequality, but also allowed them to frequently win such suits.

Fighting for Rights in the Courts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Litigation ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Southern State ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
The Past ◽  
Civil Cases

Chapter 8 traces African Americans’ continuing civil litigation in southern courts from 1921 to 1950. Beginning in the 1920s, African Americans began to litigate a wider range of types of civil cases against whites in southern state supreme courts. Black litigants were no longer forced to rely so heavily on stereotypes and claims of ignorance and vulnerability to win a case. More and more of black litigants’ seemingly ordinary appellate civil cases protested intimidation and violence against African Americans or made claims for larger groups of African Americans, beyond just the individuals litigating the suits. A few cases even directly challenged discriminatory racial regimes, at times using the techniques they had used to win other kinds of civil cases over the past decades. Although some of these cases were orchestrated by racial justice organizations like the NAACP, many others were brought by individual African Americans.

Confronting Fraud Through the Courts

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Milewski
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Civil Cases

Chapter 6 examines the fraud cases that black southerners litigated against whites in the first two decades of the twentieth century, in which they accused whites of deception in property dealings. Such cases formed an unusually large proportion of civil cases involving black and white litigants in the state supreme courts examined during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In case after case, black litigants testified about their diligence in attempting to understand contracts, their own ignorance and vulnerability to deception, and their trust in the defendant. As such testimony appealed to white judges’ and jury members’ ideas of racial superiority and paternalism, as well as the legal claims needed to prove fraud, their cases often proved successful despite the widespread loss of rights and fraud occurring around them.

Malpractice & Negligence: State Supreme Courts Limit Therapists’ Duties to Third Parties

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-205
Author(s):  
Megan Cleary
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Child Sexual Abuse ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Recovered Memories ◽  
Supreme Courts ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
University Of Colorado

In recent years, the law in the area of recovered memories in child sexual abuse cases has developed rapidly. See J.K. Murray, “Repression, Memory & Suggestibility: A Call for Limitations on the Admissibility of Repressed Memory Testimony in Abuse Trials,” University of Colorado Law Review, 66 (1995): 477-522, at 479. Three cases have defined the scope of liability to third parties. The cases, decided within six months of each other, all involved lawsuits by third parties against therapists, based on treatment in which the patients recovered memories of sexual abuse. The New Hampshire Supreme Court, in Hungerford v. Jones, 722 A.2d 478 (N.H. 1998), allowed such a claim to survive, while the supreme courts in Iowa, in J.A.H. v. Wadle & Associates, 589 N.W.2d 256 (Iowa 1999), and California, in Eear v. Sills, 82 Cal. Rptr. 281 (1991), rejected lawsuits brought by nonpatients for professional liability.

The Business of State Supreme Courts, Revisited

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Herbert M. Kritzer ◽  
Paul Brace ◽  
Melinda Gann Hall ◽  
Brent D. Boyea
Keyword(s):  
State Supreme Courts ◽  
Supreme Courts
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