The Connecticut Personal Injury Case That Reached US Supreme Court

June 3, 2019 | By Polito & Harrington LLC
The Connecticut Personal Injury Case That Reached US Supreme Court

In 2011, the Mohegan tribe owned a limo driven by one of its employees, William Clarke, who subsequently rear-ended another vehicle and injured its occupants. Does that mean Clarke should be immune from liability because his employer was a sovereign Indian tribe? Prior to 2011, the answer to that question was yes.  James Harrington of Polito and Harrington challenged that decades long precedent in the case of Lewis v. Clarke which was appealed to The Connecticut Supreme Court and ultimately to The U.S. Supreme Court where in a landmark decision the Nation’s highest Court unanimously agreed with James’s argument thereby changing the law nationwide. See the results of the case here.


Federal courts have cited the case more than 50 times in the past two years, according to James Harrington, the Waterford-based attorney with Polito and Harrington who is representing the Lewis’s.

Law.com ALM Media, April 2019

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