Sassy Doll Creations, Inc. v. Watkins Motor Lines, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that a shipper “prepares” or “drafts” the bill of lading when “the shipper actually creates the bill of lading, not when it merely fills in the blanks on one the carrier has created”
• noting that the reasonable opportunity requirement “has been part of the Carmack Amendment jurisprudence for at least the past fifty years ... and has been applied throughout the circuits since that time”
• the 1995 amendments did not alter the requirement that carrier provide a shipper with a reasonable opportunity to choose between two or more levels of liability
• “Our sympathy does not go out to the drafter of a bill of lading who blames another party for the results that flow from defects in that document”
• although carrier-prepared bill of lading had a declared value box, it did not contain a space for requesting excess liability coverage and therefore did not give the shipper a reasonable opportunity to choose between two or more levels of liability
• “[A] clear change in the law by Congress could justify a panel of this court in not following an earlier panel’s decision, where the prior panel’s decision was based on legislation that had been changed or repealed.” (cleaned up)

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).