The court both decides and avoids deciding whether you can sue someone for letting you commit a crime.

Plaintiff was a disabled child-abuser placed in a group home. The home took him to a church function but failed to supervise him, whereupon he molested another child. Having pled guilty to it and been sentenced for it, he sued the group home in negligence and under the Adult Protective Services Act for letting him do it. Defendant moved for judgment on the pleadings; the trial court granted it.

On the negligence count the Court of Appeals affirms. Defendant argued the “wrongful conduct rule,” accepted elsewhere, by which you can’t sue in tort for injury resulting from your own crime (i.e., your sentence). The court suggests that that doctrine is “slippery” and declines, it says, to rule on whether it applies. Instead it gets to the same place by a different route: it decides that the injury resulting from your own crime is not a cognizable item of damage. “Injury” is the  “invasion of [a] legally protected interest,” per Restatement 7. “No properly-convicted criminal has a legally protected interest in being free from the inherent consequences of the resulting sentence.” Apparently the court does things this way to avoid the charge of abrogating a cause of action; “we are aware of no authority suggesting that “injuries” under the anti-abrogation clause should be interpreted differently than “injuries” recognized under tort law.”

But as to the vulnerable-adult claim the court vacates. The claim was only “briefly” addressed in the motion papers, which did not give it “meaningful” analysis, and the trial court’s ruling didn’t mention it. “Whether [Plaintiff] has stated a viable claim under [the statute] must be considered by the superior court in the first instance.” So the court remands.

This can’t be the proper analysis. Is it to be the law that a ruling is vulnerable because the court decides that the arguments below were insufficiently lengthy or “meaningful”? If so, by what standard are those things to be judged? The court’s real concern seems to be that the trial court issued a “detailed” ruling that didn’t separately discuss the statutory claim. But it issued a judgment and is assumed to have addressed the issues necessary to do so. If (as the Court of Appeals suggests) the negligence analysis doesn’t apply to the statutory claim then the situation is that the trial court didn’t apply the right standard, not that it skipped the issue.

The court says that “the parties have not provided any helpful briefing on this issue.” Maybe that’s the answer. We should give the court some credit: maybe the parties really didn’t give it anything to work with and it would rather rule based on the parties’ arguments than on its own theories. That’s a valid concern to have, as we’ve said several times. But in that event the answer is to request supplemental briefs, not to bend the standards of appellate review.

(Opinion: Muscat v. Creative Innervisions)

This isn’t an important case, instead its one of those cautionary tales we see too often.

Plaintiff sued the out-of-state Defendant for breach of contract. Defendant defaulted but then moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. It asked (but not until its Reply to Plaintiff’s Opposition) for an extension of time to file the motion, saying that it would have filed before the default became effective but for a computer virus that messed up its lawyers’ calendar. The trial court denied that and also entered default judgment, on the theory that the default admitted the jurisdictional allegations of the Complaint.

The Court of Appeals agrees that denying Defendant more time was proper. The computer excuse barely explains why the motion came after default and doesn’t explain why Defendant didn’t file a timely Answer in the first place.

This is what happens when lawyers work to deadlines. Instead of doing what’s important when its important they do whatever their calendar tells them has to be filed today. They have no apparent system to triage tasks and no effective task lists or reminders, much less any sense of how to time things to the needs of a particular case. And having bought software to do their thinking for them, when the computer goes down they shrug their shoulders and say it wasn’t their fault.

But Plaintiff found an even better way to lose than Defendant did. The basis for jurisdiction was the Complaint. It alleged that Defendant had a web site. Although some Arizona judges have said that that’s a perfectly good reason for jurisdiction this opinion cites a Ninth Circuit case holding that simply having a web site available to Arizonans, and everyone else, does not show purposeful contact directed toward them. The Complaint also contained a brief paragraph alleging summarily that various things happened in Arizona. “Even assuming [that paragraph] contains well-pleaded facts, it does not show that [Defendant ] purposefully availed itself of the privilege of conducting business in Arizona” nor that jurisdiction here would be reasonable. So the allegations, even assuming their truth, didn’t show jurisdiction. The Court of Appeals vacates the judgment and dismisses the case.

Did Plaintiff know it had a jurisdiction problem and do its best to tiptoe around it? Did it not know? Did it not understand enough about jurisdiction to know how to plead it? Both parties are foreign corporations yet the case arises out of an underlying lawsuit contested, for reasons unstated, in the District Court of Arizona. There being more here than meets the eye, we’ll opt for the most charitable explanation.

(Opinion: Smith & Wesson v. The Wuster)

Some observations on abuse of process.

Plaintiff built a dirt-bike track on his property for his kids. When they used the track Defendant, his neighbor, complained that they violated the county’s noise ordinance. Sheriff’s deputies cited him but Justice Court found him not guilty, whereupon he sued Defendant for abuse of process. He argued that her motives were wrong — that she acted from spite and ill-will and that she wanted to get rid of the track, which she thought hurt property values. The trial court granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss.

The Court of Appeals affirms. “[C]ontacting law enforcement to complain about a neighbor’s conduct is not use of a judicial process.” “[F]or abuse of process, a plaintiff must show that a defendant used an instrument of court process, and that did not happen here.”

But Plaintiff had a case — Ledvina (CA2 2006). Holding that making a report to law enforcement was absolutely privileged against a defamation claim, because it is “the first step in a judicial proceeding,” it went so far as to say that although defamation would not lie, abuse of process could. But that was dicta and “is not supported by any authority holding that merely reporting a crime constitutes use of a judicial process as required for an abuse of process claim.” This opinion uses instead an Iowa Supreme Court case holding that “a report to the police is not sufficient to constitute ‘legal process’ required for an abuse-of-process claim.”

The court also addresses the wrong-motive argument. Even if calling the sheriff were a use of process, to be tortious that must be done “for an ulterior purpose that was not proper in the regular conduct of the proceedings.” Plaintiff alleged that Defendant really wanted to get rid of the track. But complaining of allegedly illegal practices involving it was not improper or irregular. Quoting the Restatement, “[E]ven a pure spite motive is not sufficient where process is used only to accomplish the result for which it was created.”

(Opinion: Fappani v. Bratton)