Joint Liability of Tenants

It is not uncommon to encounter a situation when two or more original tenants under a single lease agreement would act differently, and then expect different treatment by the landlord. A non-defaulting co-tenant might want to disassociate from a defaulting one. And, sometimes, a defaulting tenant would like to take all the liability on his or her own, in an effort to save other co-tenants from being held liable alongside with the defaulter. The outcome for such intentions may be decided based on the text of the lease.

Burning Man Law

This month, Stuart Banner's book came out, covering courts' treatment of baseball, exempting it from the antitrust law. Reading an article about this book, I sought of another cultural phenomena, the Burning Man festival, and decided to take a look, what impact the festival makes on shaping courts' decisions, what constitutes the Burning Man law. I found six cases, which contributed to a variety of rules.

100 Cases filed in the San Francisco Superior Court

I took a sample of 100 cases filed in the San Francisco Superior Court, to see its litigation dynamics. If another sample will be taken in a future, it will be interesting to compare, like I did with the scoop of 100 California appellate decisions, here. For now, here are my findings:

How rare an accident may still be "foreseeable"? 1 in 641,025 years.

In a recent strict liability case, Collins v. Navistar, 214 Cal.App.4th 1486 (2013), court held that it is possible for a vehicle manufacturer to foresee an event, with an effective chance of .003―.009 per billion vehicle-miles.