[xoxoxoBruce]

A suit over a revealing picture in a New Jersey high school yearbook has become a symposium on education and tort-claim law, and it is teaching a school board and nine former students why it's good to have insurance.

Tyler Bennett of Colts Neck claims he suffered emotional distress because his genitals were partly visible in a basketball game picture in his 2001 school yearbook.

The suit says Colts Neck High School authorities acted slowly to suppress the yearbook, worsening the distress Bennett suffered as a senior the next year.

And there's a novel issue: Does the publisher of such a picture violate child pornography laws if publication was inadvertent?

So far, the answer to that question has been no. Indeed, the whole litigation has been a dud for the plaintiff. In 2005, a trial judge cited Bennett's lack of evidence of psychological harm and found no basis for a suit under the Tort Claims Act. On June 23, an appeals court affirmed the dismissal.

Undeterred, plaintiffs attorney Steven Kessel notified his adversaries this month that he will seek review by the state Supreme Court. He is drafting an appeal that raises the issues anew and will set off a new round of defense briefs in the case, Bennett v. Board of Education, Freehold Regional High School District, Mon-L-4700-03.

Schools occasionally get sued. But Bennett's case is rare because he also named nine students who worked on the yearbook, requiring them to obtain counsel for the long and costly litigation.

"It was awful," says Nathanya Simon of Florham Park's Schwartz, Simon, Edelstein, Celso & Kessler, regular outside counsel to the Freehold Regional High School District, which includes Colts Neck High School. "Some were able to get homeowner's coverage but some of them didn't and had to pay their own attorneys."

Even the plaintiffs counsel is sympathetic.

Kessel concedes there is no testimony to suggest anyone intended to put an embarrassing photo in the yearbook.

But when the book was distributed to seniors on a Friday before school's end, the photo touched off a buzz that Bennett and his mother sought to stifle, the suit says.

They went to the principal on Monday before class and asked him to take action to stop further distribution and to recall yearbooks given to seniors. But he did nothing until Bennett went home in shame during the morning and both his parents returned later in the day, the suit says.

Seniors were told to return their yearbooks, and the offending picture was cut out in every copy that was subsequently distributed.

But Kessel says the action was too slow and some students retained their original copies. "We know for a fact that some of the seniors got them," he says.

Bennett stayed home for the last few days of school and when he returned in September he was subject to constant teasing, in one case by a teacher, in another by a player on a rival basketball team, Kessel says.

According to his theory of the case, the editors violated Bennett's privacy and inflicted emotional distress, and the school is liable too because it failed in its supervisory duty.

More.
For every Firestone, there are hundreds (thousands?) of these.