Are courts obliged to act if they&#39;re aware of a violation, even if the parties are no longer interested? (Not sure if the title is good) Hypothetical case: Alice files a lawsuit against Bob, alleging some grievance. During the case it's established that Alice violated the law first, causing Bob to take revenge (and also violating the law in the process). Logically the court would punish both of them, but Alice persists in litigating because she believes the law will be harsher on Bob than on her. However, during the case, Bob dies. Now the court cannot penalize Bob, so Alice is no longer interested and wants to withdraw the case. Is the court still obliged to rule against Alice, or do they dismiss the case? In other words, is the court obliged to issue penalties even though one party is dead and the other is no longer interested? If the country matters, assume the USA.
Alice files a lawsuit against Bob This is a civil suit, it will not lead to any court punishing Alice, or anyone else. If facts come out showing that Alice violated the law, the local prosecutor could, but need not, file a criminal case against Alice. If the prosecutor does not file such a case, Alice's worst possible outcome is to get no damages, with costs and fees awarded to Bob (or his estate). If Bob dies and Alice wishes to drop the case, there is no obvious reason not to permit it, unless Bob or his estate has counter-sued. Bob (or his estate) might ask for costs and legal fees, and perhaps sanctions for a frivolous suit. The court might well asses whether to grand such a costs order before or as it dismisses the case. ; The question seems to confuse the idea of a civil lawsuit and that of a criminal prosecution. In an Civil lawsuit, one person (or company) (the plaintiff) claims that another (or several others) (the defendant) have violated an agreement, or have in some other way caused legal injury. For example, if Alice claims that she had a contract with Bob and Bob violated the terms that would be a civil suit. Or if Alice claims that Bob infringed her copyright, or slandered her, or falsely advertised something or any of many other possible situations. The case would be Alice C vs Bob D. However, if Alice accuses Bob of having stolen from her, or punched her, or raped her, that woulds be a criminal accusation. The police would investigate, and if they found evidence to support the accusation, the local prosecutor could (but need not) file a case, which would be something like State of Franklin vs Bob D IN THE CRIMINAL COURT. Alice would be a witness, but not the plaintiff. If the investigation found that Alice committed a crime also, the prosecutor might file, State of Franklin vs Alice C Or the prosecutor might file both cases, or neither. The prosecutor has wide discretion whether or not to prosecute in any particular case, even when the evidence is clear. Neither Alice nor Bob could insist that either criminal case be dropped. Only the prosecutor, or the Judge, could do that. A criminal court is a different court from a civil court, and in many places a given judge hears only one or the other type of case. In many other places a judge may hear both kinds, but any one case is still either civil or criminal.
As many parties as have standing. The First Amendment protects the right to petition for redress of grievances, so any limitation on that right would be highly disfavored. When there's a rush of cases like this, though, there are a few option for dealing with them. For instance, a plaintiff may seek class certification, permitting him to stand in for similarly situated parties so they don't need to litigate themselves, or a court may consolidate the cases if they are sufficiently similar.
Probably not. Overview You haven't specified a jurisdiction. I will talk about Australia because that's what I'm familiar with. In Australia the most relevant area of law would be tort, specifically negligence. The university would be liable to pay damages if a court found that it owed a duty of care to your friend, that it breached that duty, and that your friend suffered injury ('injury' including loss of property as well as mental suffering) as a result of that breach. Also potentially relevant would be contract law, if your friend and the university had entered into some kind of agreement relating to his security, or equity, if the university had somehow acted to lead your friend to rely, to his detriment, on the university protecting him (promissory estoppel: Walton Stores v Maher). However, I think this is unlikely unless, for some reason, the university had put up signs saying 'Please come onto our land and we will be responsible for your security'. Negligence You have stated that 'it is their responsibility to make sure all students are safe on campus.' It is not clear whether you mean to state that as a fact or whether you are suggesting it as a possible hypothetical basis of liability. I am not aware of a case that establishes the proposition that universities do have such a duty. The judgments in Modbury Triangle Shopping Centre v Anzil (2000) 205 CLR 254 discuss the liability of the occupier of land (such as the university in your example) for injuries inflicted by criminals upon people present on land (such as your friend in your example). In that case, the defendant ran a shopping centre. The plaintiff worked at a shop in the shopping centre. At the end of the plaintiff's shift at 10.30pm, it was dark outside because the shopping centre switched the lights in the car park off at 10pm. The plaintiff was mugged in the shopping centre car park on his way out to his car. The key question there was whether the defendant shopping centre was under a duty to keep the lights on for workers leaving work (along with the question of how the failure to illuminate the area led to the attack i.e. whether the plaintiff still have been mugged if the lights were on). Therefore the question that we are presently interested in, about an occupier's responsibility to protect visitors, is only dealt with as a side issue in that case. But the principle is pretty well-established that, generally, you are not responsible to protect another person from the criminal acts of a third person. The common law has a strong presumption against imposing liability for 'omissions' as distinct from acts, which is another way of saying that the courts don't want people being liable to run out into the street and help people. See paragraphs 27 and 28 and thereabouts in Modbury Triangle. Particular relationships may exist which create such a duty. One is in relation to school children; the school is responsible for taking such care of the child as a parent would. The relevant features of this the school-child relationship include the child's vulnerability as a child and the way the school controls their movements and enviroment during the school day. I presume that your friend is not a child and the university does not control his or her movements. Therefore a court is likely to be looking at the general principle that the university is not responsible for protecting people from the criminal acts of strangers, and then looking (and probably not finding) any special feature of the relationship between your friend and the university that creates an aspect of vulnerability, reliance or control that makes it reasonable to impose a duty of care. Some people think that there is a general principle that if something bad happens to them, some identifiable person with cash must be responsible for paying compensation, whether that is an insurer, the government or a nearby corporation. The common law has not picked up that principle. The common law would slate the responsibility home primarily to the mugger. Sue them. What does the university have to do with it? Conceivably the university might also be liable along with the mugger, but the fact that an injury occurred and nobody else can in practice be held responsible does not in itself make the university liable. As mentioned by Pat W., there may be some other feature that creates a duty, such as if the university had made some change to the environment that allowed made the attack to occur when it wouldn't otherwise have e.g. moving your friend's dormitory so that the only entrance was through a dark alley, or if the attack occurred inside a university building where the university controlled entry (even then not sure that would get your friend over the line).
The amount requested has little or nothing to do with the amount, if any, eventually awarded. Once can sue "for 100 million dollars" and be awarded 100 dollars, and although it is rarer, one can be awarded more than the amount asked for when suit is field. That initial amount now serves as a peg to hang sensational news stores on, and nothing more. The plaintiff, and the plaintiff's lawyer, may consider that such publicity serves them well. Such inflated amounts are not grounds to dismiss the suit, so there is no downside to including them, except possibly negative publicity if people mock the demand.
The basic option that one has when a contract has been breached is that the harmed party sues the damaging party, seeking compensation. Sometimes, contracts contain arbitration clauses which limits how disputes can be resolved – for example "disputes shall be subject to binding arbitration by Jones Arbicorp". Whether or not such a clause is legal would depend on the jurisdiction. A clause which states that there can be no legal remediation of breach means that the contract would be unenforceable, and is not in fact a contract. Courts generally strive to construe anything that looks like a contract as being a contract, and they can set aside a particular aspect of a contract. If the other party attempted to have the suit thrown out because of a "there is no remedy" clause, the court would most likely find that to not be a valid term in the contract. It does depends on what exactly the clause says. Your attorney would need to look at the language of the contract to advise you as to the best course of action (asking us for legal advice makes the question off-topic).
The appeals court has found that the county court judge made a decision that was consistent with the evidence that was presented at trial. As such, the decision is sound. It appears that the defendant tried to present additional/different evidence or different arguments about the law in the appeal than they did at trial - this is not permitted. As to responsibility, the defendant and their legal team were responsible for deciding how to run their case and what evidence to present and what arguments to run. What evidence to present and how to present it and what submissions to make on the law is a tactical decision for each party. You can get it wrong. That doesn't let you try again on appeal. If your barrister has been negligent, and that directly caused you to lose, you can sue your barrister. In terms of interpreting a particular paragraph of a judgement, the appeals court may or may not make comment on a particular paragraph but the reasons, while important, are not really subject to interpretation other than that. A judgement will give orders, these should be very precise and not open to interpretation - things like &quot;the defendant will pay X to the plaintiff&quot; or &quot;the case is dismissed&quot; etc.
A good starting point would be the SCOTUS opinion, or everything on SCOTUSblog, especially the application for injunctive relief filed on Aug. 30. There is a long sequence of petitions and orders which ask the courts either to issue an injunction preventing the law from taking force, or to vacate an administrative stay of proceedings by the lower court regarding petitioner's challenge. The lower court denied the petitions, therefore petitioners turn to SCOTUS to get an injunction against the law. Then you can turn to the SCOTUS opinion to see what the reasons were, for and against the petition. The majority position is that an applicant must carry the burden of making a “strong showing” that it is “likely to succeed on the merits,” that it will be “irreparably injured absent a stay,” that the balance of the equities favors it, and that a stay is consistent with the public interest. The majority concludes that The applicants now before us have raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law at issue. But their application also presents complex and novel antecedent procedural questions on which they have not carried their burden. Immediately after this the court comments that federal courts enjoy the power to enjoin individuals tasked with enforcing laws, not the laws themselves. However, it is unclear whether the named defendants in this lawsuit can or will seek to enforce the Texas law against the applicants in a manner that might permit our intervention The law states that Any person, other than an officer or employee of a state or local governmental entity in this state, may bring a civil action against any person who and the named respondents (government workers of various sorts) all appear to be precluded from filing an action – thus an injunction against the judge is superfluous since he cannot file a lawsuit anyhow. It is also unclear whether SCOTUS can issue an injunction against state judges asked to decide a lawsuit under Texas’s law. When SCOTUS say &quot;it is unclear&quot; in this context, they mean that petitions did not adequately demonstrate that the court can in fact issue such an injunction. It's not that SCOTUS cannot decide such matters after extensive consideration of the facts / arguments and discussion, it's that the standards for an emergency action require something that the court found lacking in the petition: we cannot say the applicants have met their burden to prevail in an injunction or stay application. In reaching this conclusion, we stress that we do not purport to resolve definitively any jurisdictional or substantive claim in the applicants’ lawsuit.
Judges and justices can file lawsuits like anyone else, but ordinarily the judges who are colleagues of the judge or justice would recuse themselves and it would be assigned to another venue at trial (in the case of a trial court judge), and on appeal would be assigned to judges who don't have a personal relationship with the judge (possibly sitting by assignment from another appellate jurisdiction or by senior judges who weren't on the bench when this judge was on the bench). A U.S. Supreme Court justice's suit would not be considered recusal worth by an unfamiliar lower court judge who is only theoretically in the jurisdiction of the justice and no suit by a U.S. Supreme Court justice has ever been deemed cert worthy. If it did reach the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice would be expected to, but not required in any enforceable way, to recuse from hearing the case.