“[Diane] Tran said she works both full-time and part-time jobs, in addition to taking advanced and college level courses,” and her parents have “split up and moved away” leaving her in charge of a younger sister, which make it hard to keep to the exact school day. Judge Lanny Moriarty did not seem sympathetic: “If you let one run loose, what are you gonna’ do with the rest of ’em?” [CBS Atlanta](& Hans Bader)
P.S. Earlier on truancy laws here.
“While lawyer Scott Marshall has pleaded guilty to a murder charge, his victim’s mother has filed an unusual wrongful-death suit against not only him but his parents and his 92-year-old grandmother.” [Texas Lawyer]
A veterinarian-dreaded development: “Fort Worth’s 2nd Court of Appeals has ruled that value can be attached to the love of a dog, overruling a 120-year-old case in which the Texas Supreme Court held that plaintiffs can only recover for the market value of their pets.” [Texas Lawyer, earlier]
After we passed along a recent report that Beaumont, Texas lawyers had filed 59 lawsuits the day before the state’s new “loser-pays” package of litigation reforms was to take effect, Texas attorney Brooks Schuelke responded on Twitter as follows (re-formatted and edited for clarity), saying that the issue wasn’t the loser-pays provision, but a separate “responsible third party” provision that set a malpractice trap for lawyers that delayed: “The responsible third party provisions allowed a defendant to name a party, and then plaintiff could join them even if the statute of limitations had expired. The law was changed to remove the ability to sue regardless of the statute of limitations. But defendant can’t name a party not disclosed in discovery. The amendment means we have to file suit long before the statute of limitations expires to send discovery asking defendant to name who it might name. So many cases nearing the statute of limitations had to be filed before the effective date of the change or else they could be victim to the amendment.”