Federal Judiciary

NO-FAULT SCORECARD
By Mark Thompson
markthomp@yahoo.com
Posted 1-30-08

The Appellate Division’s Second Department has picked up this year where it left off last year in at least one respect: the appellate court is trying to teach some lessons about the ins and outs of the state’s no-fault auto insurance statute to a bunch of wayward judges in Brooklyn.

The key threshold question in Insurance Law cases is whether the claimed injury was sufficiently “serious,” as that term is defined in the statute, that the plaintiff should be allowed to by-pass the no-fault compensation system and sue for damages.

Trial judges in the five boroughs of New York City were second-guessed on “serious injury” rulings a total of 66 times last year. The Second Department, which covers Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, accounted for 57 of those reversals, and 43 of them were Brooklyn cases. In stark contrast, the Appellate Division’s First Department, which covers the other two boroughs, reversed “serious injury” determinations just nine times in the Bronx last year, while not a single no-fault threshold ruling by a judge in Manhattan was reversed in full in 2007.

Full post as published by Judicial Reports on January 30, 2008 (boomark / email).