Legal Practice Guide 6: False Imprisonment, Uber, and Other Thoughts

Here's a downright frightening story of an alleged attempted kidnapping from a law professor's unfortunate and harrowing Uber trip to the Denver airport that, if as reported, absolutely should result in criminal and civil penalties beyond mere termination.

The LSTC offers its sympathies and only the following limited and generic observations, explicitly noting that it makes no factual assertions of any kind and particularly no factual allegations or suggestions regarding the professor in question:

• The facts as presented appear to establish a prima facie false imprisonment under common law.
• If a generic intentional tort client comes to your office, young lawyer, I imagine the case is typically much stronger with a police report filed from the scene of or immediately after the attempted kidnapping, if not a 911 call during, but sometimes making a certain airplane flight is crucial.  Furthermore, the ideal client would call an alternative transportation service instead of the one that just sent the attempted assailant.  While I've never actually met an ideal client, juries hold these things against people, particularly women, which is a truly unfair prejudice that should be corrected.
• Is Uber liable for this sort of thing?  It surely depends on numerous factors such as prior knowledge of problems with the driver, the language of various contracts, and quirks of state law, not to mention a jury's wrath at the apparent lack of safeguards and background checks.  The LSTC expresses no opinion but looks forward to the next detailed law review article(s) explaining the various permutations and possibilities, which we have no doubt will be forthcoming from any number of fine legal scholars.
• Speaking of jury prejudice, in a hypothetical lawsuit, do you as the evil hypothetical defendant try and inflame jurors' irrational prejudices against academia and sinecure law professors?  Again - hypothetically - if the plaintiff has written articles questioning, say, the idea of segregated women's sports, and publishing such articles is part of the regular course of her occupation, do you as the defendant intentionally bring those unpopular articles up to stoke purple-state prejudice against said professor?  Is it proper to do so?
• Back to vicarious liability, why aren't law schools shuttling their walking intellectual capital in a private luxury service with black Lincolns and Cadillacs?  A commonplace Uber? I'd suggest suing the law school, too, but all know where that road leads, pardon the pun.
• We have rules of evidence and rules of evidence are a very good thing with the noble (partial) goal of reducing prejudice, but in my somewhat limited experience with juries, they seem to be able to read the parties regardless of whether the damaging inadmissible material is known or not and adjust their empathetic/sympathetic responses accordingly.  For example, if your plaintiff is the type of man who would seek immediately seek publicity and appeals to secondary officials for relatively minor offenses against him or his property, or has in the past exaggerated what makes a viable claim a claim, a jury can usually sense those qualities.  Case facts that should make a jury go, "my god!" may make them, instead, say, "oh lord..." solely because of a perception - justified or baseless, but there - of someone gaming the/a system.
• As a brief note on the First Amendment: chilling effects are real.