August 17–August 23, 2024
- Plaintiff involved in minor car accident who later told a bunch of different stories about his alleged injuries sues Defendant, claiming he suffered neck and shoulder injuries due to Defendant’s negligence. Jury: No liability; judgment for Defendant. Tennessee Court of Appeals: There’s plenty of material evidence to support the jury’s verdict—including evidence that the Defendant was not at fault and that Plaintiff lied about a ton of things. So the jury’s verdict is affirmed.
- Corporation (as Defendant): Loses litigation related to a promissory note, which is deemed enforceable after Corporation waives a fraudulent inducement defense. Corporation (as Plaintiff), in second lawsuit over the same promissory note: We will now sue for fraud offensively, then! Tennessee Court of Appeals: You will not. This whole thing is res judicata.
- Husband petitions for criminal contempt against Wife. After hearing, the trial court denies Husband’s criminal contempt petition. Husband somehow appeals, even though jeopardy presumably attached. Tennessee Court of Appeals: We dismiss for briefing non-compliance and never mention anything else, thereby leaving your summarist unclear about how the hell this appeal was filed in the first place.
- Female College Student files Title IX complaint alleging that Male College Student continued to have sex with her after she withdrew consent. Male College Student then sues Female College Student (who should have hired Horwitz Law instead of lawyers who are in the SLAPP-suit business themselves) for defamation. Tennessee Court of Appeals (in 2021): This is a TPPA case, since filing a Title IX complaint is petitioning. Tennessee Court of Appeals (in 2024): And following remand, Male College Student satisfied his burden of making a prima facie case. Female College Student also can’t establish any valid defenses at the TPPA stage because her defenses hinge on her credibility, which is in dispute.
- Ex-Husband, a disabled veteran: My VA disability benefits can’t be considered when calculating my child support obligations; doing so violates the Supremacy Clause. Trial court: Wrong. Tennessee Court of Appeals: Maybe yes maybe no, but the argument is a constitutional challenge to Tennessee’s child support guidelines, and because Ex-Husband didn’t timely notify the Attorney General of that challenge as required, it’s waived.
- Oft-disciplined lawyer seeks accelerated interlocutory appeal of a trial court’s order denying a motion to recuse. Tennessee Court of Appeals: We regret to inform you that because you don’t understand stuff (like rules), you filed here after the 21-day appeal period expired, so this untimely appeal is dismissed.
- Man has his SNAP benefits terminated after Tennessee Department of Human Services determines that he was receiving undisclosed VA benefits that push his gross monthly income over the eligibility threshold. Man then unsuccessfully challenges the termination through the administrative appeal process and continues appealing. Tennessee Court of Appeals: It was Man’s “primary responsibility to provide any evidence to support his statements on the application and resolve any questionable information,” and because he “failed to comply with these requirements, the Hearing Officer properly affirmed the denial of benefits.”
- “This second recusal appeal in the underlying conservatorship case is currently before this Court on remand from the Tennessee Supreme Court.” Your Summarist: But since that description alone already gives me a headache, and since the split recusal opinion is somehow 38 pages long, you will have to read the Tennessee Court of Appeals’ fourteen-part opinion affirming the trial court’s denial of the appellants’ recusal motion and Judge McGee’s separate dissenting opinion yourself.
- Prospective Buyer whom Seller had declared to be in default seeks return of $18 million in earnest money, files claims against Seller for conversion and a declaration that the liquidated damages provision in the Parties’ contract was unenforceable. Trial court dismisses the conversion claim on a Rule 12 motion for failure to state a claim grants summary judgment to Seller as to the declaratory judgment claim. Tennessee Court of Appeals: The trial court erred by dismissing Prospective Buyer’s conversion claim based on the economic loss doctrine, which “only applies in products liability cases and should not be extended to other claims.” And since there was “no evidence presented by Seller in support of its motion for summary judgment upon which the trial court could base a determination as to whether the amount of liquidated damages ‘was a reasonable estimate of potential damages’” (as opposed to an unenforceable penalty), the trial court erred in granting summary judgment to Seller on the declaratory judgment claim, too.
- “This is a dispute over homeowner’s insurance coverage” between homeowners and one of America’s crappiest insurance companies, which baselessly denies claims all the time. Erie Insurance Company: We properly denied coverage because our Insureds—whose premiums we happily collected on this policy until they made a claim—made a material misrepresentation in their application, thereby voiding their policy. Insureds: What Erie is calling a “material misrepresentation” was, in fact, an answer that Erie’s own software automatically populated on the insurance application it gave us to sign, which we were never then asked about and still don’t really understand. Tennessee Court of Appeals: In addition to the multi-pronged record evidence that Insureds did not make any intentional misrepresentations, because the relevant term (“loss”) was not defined by the policy and reasonable people can disagree about its meaning here, it is not even clear that Insureds made a misrepresentation at all. Thus, whether Insureds made an intentional misrepresentation should be determined by a jury at trial, and the trial court’s judgment granting Erie summary judgment is reversed. And by the way, Tennessee law “generally favors the validity of insurance contracts.”
Firm Highlights
After years of advocacy by Horwitz Law, its advocacy partners, its clients, and others, the civil rights division of the Department of Justice has announced that it is opening a federal investigation into CoreCivic’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Center—a hellhole of a prison that has been chronically understaffed for years—and the Tennessee Department of Correction’s tolerance of the unconstitutional conditions there. Given that the only meaningful action that the Middle District of Tennessee has taken in reference to the facility was to issue, at CoreCivic’s behest, a prior restraint against your summarist back in 2022 that unconstitutionally ordered him to stop speaking out about the heinous conditions there and to delete public statements about the conditions at the prison, the DOJ’s announcement—which cites exactly the issues that your summarist was ordered to stop talking about—is something resembling vindication. Read all about it below! Insist on better elected and appointed government officials, too, because Tennessee is not sending its best.
https://apnews.com/article/tennessee-prison-investigation-corecivic-justice-47588d838c4d59e5884425b95daa14ff
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2024/08/20/doj-investigating-trousdale-turner-corecivic-run-tennessee-prison/74871253007/
https://www.newschannel5.com/news/new-federal-investigation-will-look-into-living-conditions-at-trousdale-county-correctional-center
https://www.axios.com/local/nashville/2024/08/20/tennessee-prison-doj-investigation-trousdale-turner
