Red Service Dog Answer Fact Pattern Question

week 4 fact pattern:

In May 2016, Mr. Varney traveled to New York to visit his father with his wife and daughter. While Mr. Varney checked his work emails in the family’s hotel room in a no-frills motel, his wife and daughter went down to the pool to waste some time before dinner. As his wife and daughter attempted to leave the pool area and head in the direction of the elevator, Mr. Varney’s daughter, who was five years old at the time, saw an elderly couple entering the pool area with a Boston Terrier dog wearing a red “service dog” vest. Because the Varney family owns a Boston Terrier and because his daughter had never seen a Boston Terrier “service dog,” Mr. Varney’s daughter bent down to pet the dog. At the same time, the dog’s owners tried to tell my daughter not to pet their dog because he was vicious. As Mr. Varney’s daughter leaned down, the dog took a bite of her face. The bite resulted in the need for plastic surgery and now is now deadly afraid of dogs. Mr. Varney later learned that the elderly couple never had the dog trained as a service dog. Instead, the elderly couple, who both suffer from recognized disabilities, purchased the red “service dog” vest from the internet. Mr. Varney asks if he can sue the hotel or the elderly couple for his daughter’s injuries.

The material above in italics are your notes of the story that Mr. Varney told you. For purposes of this assignment, assume that you are a member of the New York State Bar, but that you do a majority of your legal work in Alabama. Because you are not familiar with New York law on the various issues raised by this situation, you need to do some legal research on the legal issues raised by Jimmy Varney’s situation.

Review the fact pattern from Week#4 dealing with Mr. Varney’s daughter who got a dog bite in New York. Assume that Mr. Varney, a citizen of Alabama, filed a complaint in the United States District for the Southern District of New York based on diversity of citizenship against the dog owners, who are citizens of New York, and the hotel, owned by a corporation with headquarters in Delaware. Assume that you are working for a firm that is representing the dog owners. The dog owners have asked you to file a motion for summary judgment. Do some research into the standard of review that the district court judge would apply when evaluating the dog owners’ motion for summary judgment. Locate the applicable cases and Rules of Civil Procedure that the district court judge may review when making his or her decision on the motion for summary judgment. Then, provide outline what additional information, you would need to learn about the complaint to assess whether to file the motion for summary judgment on behalf of the dog owners. Organize your findings and recommendation in the form of a short internal memo.

In preparing your short memo, please use the following memo as an example:

http://www.law.cuny.edu/legal-writing/students/memorandum/memorandum-3.html