“A state lawmaker tells WMWV-FM that the Mount Washington Hotel and Resort has told other businesses with ‘Mount Washington’ in their name to stop using it or face a legal challenge.” The hotel says it has challenged only three lodging businesses and does not intend to go after other local businesses named after the mountain. [AP, WMUR, Boston Globe]
P.S. Commenter Mannie: “It gets better. The IOC routinely harasses businesses on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for using the name ‘Olympic.'”
Advocates have been hawking the ban in the state legislature as a tenant protection measure. To their dismay, however, Gov. Paterson has signaled that he intends to veto the bill. [NYT, earlier] The Times travel section had a story over the weekend praising the new kind of “Social B&B” arrangement as a welcome travel bargain, but the newspaper does not seem to have realized that there is any connection between its two articles.
Is it too cynical to detect a whiff of hotel-protection in this crackdown? [Sean O’Neill, Newsweek Budget Travel]
“A year after ‘Kung Fu’ actor David Carradine died from a dangerous sex practice, his wife has filed suit, claiming he would still be alive if he hadn’t been left alone in a hotel that night.” California attorney and Overlawyered favorite Mark Geragos is representing Anne Carradine. [ABC News]
Decedent, Lloyd A. Wiseman, a vice president of a San Francisco bank, died of asphyxiation and burns in a hotel room in New York City. He was in that city on bank business, and his traveling expenses, including his hotel bills, were paid by the bank. A woman, not his wife but registered as such, was found unconscious in his room and died shortly thereafter. There was evidence that they had been drinking. Sometime between 4 and 5 in the morning of his death, Wiseman telephoned the hotel manager for help because of a fire in his room. After calling the fire department, the manager went to the room but was unable to open the door with his passkey. Firemen arrived shortly thereafter and broke into the room but were too late to save the occupants. It was the opinion of the assistant fire marshal that the fire was caused by careless smoking by either one or both of the occupants.
The California Supreme Court went on to hold that Wiseman’s widow and children were entitled to death benefits from his employer because his death “was proximately caused by the employment”—a remarkable definition of proximate cause. The Court reasoned that Wiseman might have died while entertaining a legitimate guest in the hotel room (at 4 in the morning?), so the fact that the death occurred in the course of nookie was irrelevant. That seems to me to prove too much: Wiseman might have died smoking in his bed at home, too, and he just happened to be in a hotel when his bad habits killed him. But this was part of Judge Traynor’s successful remaking of tort law in the 1950’s, and the death of proximate cause is a large part why we have the mess we have today. Wiseman v. Industrial Acc. Com. (1956) 46 Cal. 2d 570.
(You can tell that this is still over fifty years ago, though, because the widow didn’t sue the hotel or cigarette company.)
OnPoint News: “Taking employment law into uncharted waters, a $645 million lawsuit alleges the operator of the Hard Rock resort in Las Vegas is liable for the death of its former CEO’s girlfriend because it consented to his ‘hedonistic lifestyle.’” Family members of the 23-year-old woman, who overdosed on drugs in the former CEO’s suite, say the hotel should be responsible because it knowingly cultivated an image of high living, drug use and promiscuity, which made his conduct with respect to her something “within the course and scope of his employment”. The former CEO has already settled a wrongful-death suit brought by the woman’s father.
Connecticut Post: “Attorneys representing the Stamford Marriott Hotel & Spa and other firms being sued by a woman raped in their parking garage in 2006 withdrew special defenses Monday that claimed the woman was negligent and careless and that she and her children failed to ‘mitigate their damages.'” [via Christopher Fountain and followup] More: John Bratt, Baltimore Injury Law (with kind words for this site).
They might make you uneasy in new ways [Lowering the Bar, scroll]
A Queens, N.Y. man has sued Starwood Hotels and American Express, saying that at an Amex-recommended hotel in Sardinia he and his sons were held hostage by hotel staffers, sometimes at gunpoint, and forced to spend upwards of a hundred thousand dollars on hotel, jewelry, boutique and nightclub charges. [Adam Klasfeld/Courthouse News, New York Post] Cityfile expresses a marked degree of skepticism toward Alexander Maryasin’s story and links “13 different lawsuits that [he] has filed in Queens alone in recent years”.
It can get tricky when 1) having swine flu may itself count as a protected disability under laws like California’s; 2) innkeepers are required to report communicable disease to authorities; 3) they must nonetheless avoid infringing customers’ privacy; and 4) they can face liability for not taking steps to protect fellow guests and their own workers. And don’t even think of noticing that a new guest is arriving from Mexico… (via Childs; more on hotels and the ADA)