Atlanta Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

I field a good number of calls every year from concerned parents regarding injuries to their children at school.  The injuries usually occur on the playground or from other students (bullies) in the classroom.  The parents are upset as they claim that the injuries could have been prevented by proper supervision by the teachers and/or administrators. Typically, I tell the parent that it is quite difficult to pin liability on the teacher and the school for these harms.  A recent court case on this very issue was published today by the Georgia Supreme Court and is instructive for future student injuries at school.

In Barnett v. Caldwell, S17G0641, a high school student, Antoine Williams, was engaging in horseplay with another student at Benjamin E. Mays High School, a school in Southwest Atlanta.  The attending teacher, Phyllis Caldwell, left her classroom unattended around 2:45 p.m., and asked another teacher to “listen out” for her class.  Ms. Caldwell did not instruct the hall monitor to watch her class.

Antoine and another student were horsing around and Antoine fell to the ground with the other student on top of him.  The incident caused Antoine to lacerate a major blood vessel by a dislocated collarbone.  EMT took Antoine to the hospital where he was pronounced dead.

(photo attributed to Wikipedia)

The Boston Scientific Corporation manufactured a transvaginal mesh prescription medical device that was designed to prevent the pelvic organs from falling through the vagina. The mesh sheet is made from a type of plastic and is implanted surgically into the patient. The plaintiff, Amal Eghnayem, had the sheet implanted in February of 2008 to treat her pelvic organ prolapse, but began to experience severe negative reactions in the following months. Amal experienced bleeding and pain during intercourse, incontinence and pelvic pain and pressure, and during an examination it was revealed that she had exposed mesh that was causing her severe symptoms. After an unsuccessful attempt to alleviate her pain, Amal visited a second doctor who found another mesh exposure and performed a second mesh-removal surgery. Following the second surgery, Amal’s pain subsided but by that time she had lost vaginal sensitivity. Amal subsequently filed suit seeking compensatory and punitive damages based on claims for negligent design defect, negligent failure to warn, strict-liability design defect and strict-liability failure to warn. Additionally, three other plaintiffs filed lawsuits and the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia consolidated the suits.

At trial, the jury found for each of the plaintiffs on all four claims and awarded more than six million dollars to each plaintiff. The Boston Scientific Corporation appealed from the judgment on two separate grounds. First, the Boston Scientific Corporation argued that the district court abused its discretion by consolidating the plaintiff’s four suits and trying them together.  Second, the Corporation argued that the district court abused its discretion by excluding all evidence relating to the Food and Drug administration’s clearance of the mesh for sale through the FDA’s “substantial equivalence” process. The trial court excluded the evidence under two different Federal Rules of Evidence. The first, Rule 402, provides that irrelevant evidence is not admissible, and the second, Rule 403, provides that relevant evidence may be excluded, “if its probative value is substantially outweighed by a danger of . . . unfair prejudice, confusing the issues, misleading the jury, undue delay, or wasting time.”

Generally, a court must have proper jurisdiction over a case or controversy before that case may be heard in a given county or state. Proper jurisdiction requires that a court have both personal and subject matter jurisdiction over a case or controversy. As to personal jurisdiction, courts have recognized two categories: general and specific. Proper general jurisdiction depends on the nature of the party to the suit and that party’s geographic location, as general jurisdiction over an individual rests only in a defendant’s domiciled state or county, and general jurisdiction over a corporation rests in a place “in which the corporation is fairly regarded as home.” Conversely, specific jurisdiction requires the suit to “arise out of or relate to the defendant’s contacts with the forum.” The primary concern of an appellate court in assessing a grant of jurisdiction over a nonresident defendant is the burden on the defendant and the accompanying Due Process Clause concerns where a defendant is forced to submit to the “coercive power of a State that may have little legitimate interest in the claims in question.”

This case, which arose from allegations that Plavix had damaged the plaintiffs’ health, was heard by the California Court of Appeals where the Court found that California courts lacked general jurisdiction, but had specific jurisdiction over the claims brought by the nonresident plaintiffs. The California Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals’ ruling based on a “sliding scale approach” to specific jurisdiction. The California Supreme Court’s “sliding scale approach” conclusion was based on Bristol Myers Squibb’s “wide ranging contacts” with the State because the nonresident’s claims were similar enough with California resident’s claims and because Bristol Myers was engaged in other activities in the State. However, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected California’s “sliding scale approach” as it was unable to square the “loose and spurious form of general jurisdiction” with the U.S. Supreme Court’s existing precedents.

On June 19, 2017, Justice Alito, with whom seven other justices joined, delivered the opinion of the Court, requiring a narrow interpretation of specific jurisdiction. According to the holding in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, Et al., specific jurisdiction requires the existence of an “affiliation between the forum and the underlying controversy, principally, an activity or an occurrence that takes place in the forum state.” So, when no connection exists, specific jurisdiction is lacking regardless of the extent of a defendant’s activities within the State unconnected to the nonresident plaintiffs. The holding further asserted that the mere fact that other plaintiffs were prescribed Plavix in California was insufficient to assert specific jurisdiction over the nonresidents’ claims.  Moreover, even the fact that Bristol Myers conducted research in California unrelated to Plavix was insufficient to support a grant of specific jurisdiction. Thus, a grant of specific jurisdiction must rest on a connection between the forum and the specific claim at issue. Attenuated links or connections, without more, are insufficient to satisfy the jurisdictional requirements.