Federal Judiciary

SPINAL MANTRA
By Mark Thompson
markthomp@yahoo.com
Posted 02-27-08

The Appellate Division’s Second Department called two more judges onto the carpet last week for a lesson about the state’s no-fault auto insurance law. They joined a list of approximately two dozen other judges who have been overturned by Second Department appellate panels in the past year for setting the “serious injury” threshold too low for lawsuits attempting to get past the state’s no-fault law and into court. About half of the reversals, including the latest two, have included the identically worded admonishment that without something more, “the mere existence of a herniated or bulging disc is not evidence of a serious injury.”

In one of last week’s pair of reversals, the Appellate Division said Kings County Justice Martin Schneier gave too much credence to Shmuel Deutsch’s “serious injury” claim, though it was built on little more than the “mere existence of a herniated or bulging disc.” Besides that, there was no competent medical evidence of loss of range of motion in his spine that was “even roughly contemporaneous” with the accident, the appellate division said, reversing Schneier and booting the case out of court.  Deutsch v. Tenempaguay (February 19)

Full post as published by Judicial Reports on February 27, 2008 (boomark / email).