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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Here’s My Invite, so Friend Me, Maybe? Changing Notions of Privacy in Social Media

I first want to take a moment to thank the Marquette Law School Blog editorial faculty for inviting me to be the alumni blogger this month. I have enjoyed the content the MULS blog has offered since its inception, and I am honored to now be a part of it.

I primarily practice in management-side, labor and employment law in Wisconsin, but I have a special interest in how social media interacts with these practice areas. My posts will focus on various ways that social media collides with the law in this respect and others.

As a side note, I not only observe social media but I am a user, too. You can follow me on Twitter @jesse_dill. I typically Tweet about developments dealing with labor and employment law, Milwaukee, and the occasional grumblings about how my favorite teams are not meeting my perfectly reasonable (read: exceedingly high) expectations.

Social media services like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Instagram, and the like have quickly become the hot topic in my line of work because of their widespread use among employers and employees. Whether an employer wants to utilize a service for recruiting purposes or try to regulate its use by employees in the workplace, a host of fascinating issues arise while attempting to apply old legal theories to these new devices.

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Your Children’s Ultimate Weapon: Suing You for Emotional Distress?

In what surely must be one of those “truth is stranger than fiction” stories comes the news that two siblings, one 20 and one 23, sued their mother for intentional infliction of emotional distress from “bad mothering.”

In 2009, Steven Miner II and his sister Kathryn Miner sued their mother, Kimberly Garrity, for emotional distress due to her alleged bad parenting and requested $50,000 in damages.

Although the Miner children grew up in Barrington Hills, Illinois, in a $1.5 million home, they apparently felt deprived of a proper mother. 

Continue ReadingYour Children’s Ultimate Weapon: Suing You for Emotional Distress?