Tort Law – Page 7 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

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

Post author:Jesse Dill
Post published:July 27, 2012
Post category:Business Regulation Labor & Employment Law Privacy Rights Public Tort Law

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.

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

Post author:Lisa A. Mazzie
Post published:September 6, 2011
Post category:Family Law Public Tort Law

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.

Tort Reform 2011: True Science or Pure Mischief?

Post author:Daniel D. Blinka
Post published:January 7, 2011
Post category:Evidence Tort Law Wisconsin Law & Legal System

Well, that didn’t take long. In its first week of political life, the new legislature has proposed sweeping “tort reform” legislation. The compass of the 30-plus page bill is manifold, embracing punitive damages, fee shifting, product liability claims, and damages caps. What interests me more, however, are proposed changes to the Wisconsin Rules of Evidence governing expert opinion testimony. For years, some have bemoaned Wisconsin’s failure to adopt the so-called Daubert rule (see below), an often restrictive, ad hoc standard that ostensibly identifies those “reliable” expert methodologies worthy of consideration by the courts. Unreliable methods, of course, are excluded. And while courts and commentators still debate how one goes about reliably identifying reliable methodologies, Wisconsin will apparently make up for lost time by not only adopting Daubert, but also go it one better by requiring that expert methodologies be “true” as well as reliable.

True in what sense you ask? Well, it’s unclear, although I concede it has a nice Old Testament ring to it and the idea that courts should use “true” evidence is appealing in all senses of that word. While you’re pondering what “true” might mean (and I still am), let me offer some background.