New Article by Prof. Mitten on Coach Liability for Player Injuries

The recent news of two lawsuits brought by the families of high school football players who died after strenuous summer workouts raises difficult questions regarding the legal and ethical obligations of coaches to protect their players from harm.  Coincidentally, Matt Mitten has a new paper on SSRN that explores just such questions.  Among other things, Matt thoroughly surveys the leading tort cases from across the country.  He highlights significant state-to-state variations in the law and identifies what may be an emerging (and troubling) trend among courts toward a special liability standard for coaches that is less protective of athletes than ordinary negligence.  Here is the abstract to Matt’s paper:

Regardless of the level of athletic competition, a coach is not an insurer of an athlete’s safety and is not necessarily liable for injuries that occur while coaching a sport. Although coaches generally are not liable for athlete injuries that are ‘‘part of the game,’’ there is potential legal liability if a coach’s action or inaction increases the inherent risks of injury in a sport. To recover damages for an injury, an athlete is required to prove tortious (i.e., wrongful) action or inaction by a coach caused his injury. This chapter provides an overview of the developing law regarding the nature and scope of a coach’s duty to protect the health and safety of athletes participating in youth and high school sports (who generally are minors entrusted to coaches’ custodial care) or college sports (who generally are adults that do not have a custodial relationship with their coaches) and illustrates a coach’s ethical obligation to do so. It also notes that state statutes and judicial decisions may immunize coaches at public educational institutions from liability for negligence that causes injury to athletes, and that pre-injury releases and waivers may protect both private and public school coaches from liability for their negligence.

The paper will be published as a chapter in Ethics and Coaching (Robert L. Simon ed., Westview 2012).

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People Who Have Shaped the Teaching Careers of Our Faculty—Part 5: Walter Weyrauch, Mentor and Friend

The editors of this blog have asked a number of faculty members to write about those who have been influential in their understanding of the law. In this, the fifth post in the series, Professor Alison Barnes writes about her mentor and friend, Walter O. Weyrauch (1919-2008), who was Professor of Law at the University of Florida and Honorary Professor of Law at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

Walter Weyrauch remains a unique thinker in the law, known by many worldwide, and for more than two decades since I took his classes at University of Florida, my principal guide and inspiration in law and law teaching. Our dialogue, which included hundreds of snail mail letters on goofy art note cards, reflected Walter’s world view and legal philosophy, and confirmed and developed mine.

In demeanor, he had an impassive face and long pauses. What seems a dissonance in style became cause for student comment towards the very end of his teaching career. He said of his student evaluations: “They noticed I have a German accent” for the first time since he began to teach at University of Florida 50 years before. His chuckle over this was signature. Indeed, perception of him had evolved from the days when he was rumored to have been a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe. (Chuckle.) Well into his eighties, he negotiated his retirement three years away. He said, “I thought I would be ready; I am not ready.” In part, he feared he would have too much time to reflect on unresolved feelings about his own experience.

Walter provided to me two versions of his memoirs, one hard copy (typed on his manual typewriter) and a later electronic revision, scanned in by his assistant, for my editing. He had received annotations from several scholars, but these were the last so I have worked with them and hope they will be available for any who wish to read, search for their own names, comment.

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How Should the Supreme Court Handle Warrantless GPS Tracking?

One of the most anticipated decisions of the current U.S. Supreme Court term is United States v. Jones, which was argued last fall (transcript here).  The case concerns Fourth Amendment protections from GPS tracking of automobiles.   The lower court, the D.C. Circuit, held that the government was prohibited from placing a GPS tracking device on the defendant’s car without a warrant and tracking his movements 24 hours a day for four weeks.  For the D.C. Circuit, it was crucial that the tracking was so extensive, which creates the possibility of a very fact-bound affirmance.  Alternatively, the Court might try to draw some type of bright-line rule that would be of greater assistance to lower courts in deciding future cases, either favorably to GPS tracking or otherwise.

As the Court continues to sort out these issues, the Justices might benefit from reading a new note in the Marquette Law Review by Justin Webb.  Justin’s paper, entitled “Car-ving Out Notions of Privacy: The Impact of GPS Tracking and Why Maynard is a Move in the Right Direction,” argues in favor of the D.C. Circuit’s approach.  The abstract appears after the jump.

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