Court of Petty Appeals: Students v. Mother Nature
Students
v.
Mother Nature
78 U.Va 16 (2025)
Berklich, J., delivers the opinion of the Court, in which Wu, Vanger, Kaufmann, J, and Becker, J.J. join. Demitry, C.J. concurs in part and dissents in part.
Berklich, J., delivers the opinion of the Court.
Facts
Over the weekend of January 24, Charlottesville, Virginia, along with most of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic coast, suffered a colossal snowstorm. In anticipation of Monday’s likely snow day, students fell behind on readings and substituted studying with other silly activities such as snow football, sledding, and day-drinking. However, thanks to some anonymous Gallant-type do-gooders,[1] that snow day was replaced with the familiar drudgery of virtual classes. Professors spent their time fumbling with the little dials on their Logitech computer speakers, while students resumed testing the limits of camera-off class attendance. Everyone involved just barely restrained themselves from bashing their heads into the nearest brick wall.
This was all fine and good until day two of virtual class. Over the Monday afternoon, the weekend’s sleet, initially deposited as Moroccan couscous-sized pellets of ice, had melted in the mid-day sun, re-freezing later that evening. It proceeded to stay that way. Suddenly, the whole of Charlottesville was trapped in a five-inch-thick layer of ice. Everything, from Veo scooters, to cars, to small dogs, were ensconced firmly beneath a rock-hard sheet. Every surface became instantly untraversable. Every parking space, a two-hour project, even with the appropriate—and often unavailable—metal tools. Numerous minor injuries were suffered by students and faculty alike. Dislocated shoulders, bruised rumps, hurt pride, and dinged egos abounded as Law School community members bounced around the ice in comedic pratfalls. Worse still, on the Wednesday following the great re-freeze, UVA issued the all-clear, despite the fact that grounds were not clear at all. Hordes of students filled the street to avoid unplowed sidewalks. Many male significant others were forced to go to Home Depot and buy shovels. More people missed in-person classes than had been camera-off in virtual ones.
Even now, as the Court writes this opinion, large swathes of grounds remain untraversable. Spies garden is an ice rink (for that matter so is the Park, Copeley, the Alderman shortcut, Darden, the front lawn, and about 20% of each parking lot). The temperature is not expected to go above freezing until Monday, February 2. Whether this solves all our ills is yet to be seen.
In the interim (not the docket, just the normal interim), the students of the University of Virginia School of Law bring a fascinating suit against who but Mother Nature herself. Mother Nature, created alongside Father Time somewhere around the big pop at the beginning of the universe, is best known by her anthropomorphic personification as a big green woman typically in a sort of bohemian flower crown. Plaintiffs bring claims of public nuisance and trespass to chattels, alleging that the snow both denied them access to public common rights such as roads and sidewalks, and that the frozen-in state of their cars amounts to conversion. They request injunctive relief in the form of sunshine and higher temperatures.
Discussion
Jurisdiction
Before we can reach the merits of this case, the Court is confronted with the matter of jurisdiction. Mother Nature is a resident everywhere and nowhere in particular. She does not possess a passport nor a birth certificate of any known U.S. or international state. She does not appear to be purposefully availing herself of Virginia or Petty law. But—aha—our dearest readers forget the central tenets of the Court of Petty appeals: we DGAF 😎 and “we do what we want.” 1Ls v. God, 73 U.Va 16 (2021) (finding that plaintiffs had standing to sue God, also on weather-related grounds. Citing the first Petty Rule of Civil Procedure) See also, Students of UVA Law v. God, 76 U.Va 9 (2023) (finding that residence everywhere amounts to residence in Charlottesville). And so, Mother Nature falls squarely into our snug little ambit. Take that, you dirty hippie.
The Court will choose generously to regard the multiple attempts at service, on crows, squirrels, the wind, and on the blockchain(?), as successful.
Public Nuisance
“A public nuisance is an unreasonable interference with a right common to the general public.” Students for Attending Cool Events v. UVA Law Faculty 76 U.Va 13 (2024) (quoting Restatement (Second) of Torts § 821B). Said interference is likely unreasonable if it significantly interferes with public safety, peace, comfort, or convenience. Id. We can hardly see Mother Nature’s conduct as anything but. Charlottesvillians have been denied access to things such as sidewalks and hiking trails for nearly a week.
Though Mother Nature raises no defense, and has made no appearance in this case, save for the whispered rustling of a few leaves on a barren tree in the pale light of the stars, we will grant her some leeway. One Justice was recently visited by nighttime visions, which may have amounted to a response brief. In the vision, a ghostly Rubenesque apparition maintained that the cold weather at hand was an unintentional act, an involuntary reflex beyond the conscious functions of a being as vast as Mother Nature. It is, in essence, a force majeure’s force majeure. However, intentionality is not a necessary element of public nuisance. Indeed, we find it appropriate to apply a strict liability standard here. Snow and ice are merely a changed form of water, and messing around with large quantities of water is an abnormally dangerous activity, as any good torts professor will tell you. See Strauss, Lecture on Texan Man-Made Lakes and the Johnstown Flood of 1889 (2024). We cannot accept that a being whose whole thing is “nature” is not ultimately responsible for “nature.”
Conversion
This Court has not yet had before it a conversion case, civil or criminal. The essence of conversion is a knowing taking of an object belonging to another. Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246 (1952). We have already discussed how playing with water amounts to automatic liability for harms, no matter the level of control and intention. However, as the whispering visions of an elemental force beyond our ken argue, the conversion here is not permanent. The returning of cars, bikes, and dogs to the people of Charlottesville is as inevitable as the changing of the seasons, and indeed they are perhaps one and the same. While other courts do not take into account the length of the conversion, we find it appropriate to do so here.
Law schools and schools in general are subject to this phenomenon known as “borrowing.” Indeed, this week alone has seen the borrowing of many things: jumper cables, metal shovels, dug-out cars, jackets, gloves, hats, couches, and booze, among others. The key part of borrowing is notice. It may not be forever, nor have a defined and definite period, but so long as there is adequate notice—”Hey man, I’m taking your umbrella!”—the Court can find no harm, and no foul [no blood, no ambulance]. See Basketball; John Yoo, Memorandum Regarding Military Interrogation of Alien Unlawful Combatants Held Outsided The United States [“Torture Memos”] (2002). Mother Nature provided more than adequate notice about the winter storm. Professors were predicting a snow day as early as the first day of class. If the weather clears up soon, as we are promised it will, then this may all be behind us.
Holding
Defendant Mother Nature is found to be liable for the cause of public nuisance and not liable for the cause of conversion. Defendant is ordered to play nice, and deliver on the Weather App’s promise of above-freezing temperatures and very light snow on Monday and Tuesday of this week, lest she be held in contempt of court, and we are forced to levy fines and wage garnishments by, oh, I don’t know, like putting robins and blue jays in cages, or uprooting trees or something. Whatever.
SO ORDERED.
Demitry, C.J. concurs in part and dissents in part.
I join the Court’s opinion as to jurisdiction, service of process, and its admirable refusal to take Mother Nature’s absence as a sign of disrespect rather than inevitability. Where I part ways with my colleagues is in the imposition of liability—particularly strict liability—upon a defendant who neither chose her identity nor meaningfully exercises volition over the forces attributed to her.
The majority’s holding rests on an appealing but ultimately unsound premise: that because Mother Nature is nature, she must therefore be responsible for it. This syllogism is tidy, satisfying, and wrong.
Mother Nature did not elect her role. She did not apply. She was not confirmed by the Senate. She did not assent to the portfolio of atmospheric, geological, and hydrological phenomena now attributed to her. Indeed, the record suggests she came into being, if at all, during “the big pop at the beginning of the universe,” a process notoriously light on informed consent.
The law has long been skeptical of assigning liability based solely on status rather than conduct. We do not hold guardians liable for the weather merely because they supervise children who are outside. We do not impose strict liability on time itself for missed deadlines. Yet today the Court holds Mother Nature liable precisely because she is who she is.
This is not responsibility. It is metaphysics masquerading as tort, and injustice masquerading as law. Where does it end? If “being nature” suffices for strict liability, then responsibility has lost all connection to agency. Weather becomes misconduct. Winter becomes tortious. Gravity is next.
The majority invokes strict liability for abnormally dangerous activities, reasoning that “messing around with large quantities of water” suffices. But strict liability does not eliminate the requirement that the defendant engage in an activity. One must still do the thing.
Here, the record is devoid of evidence that Mother Nature acted in any legally cognizable sense. There was no affirmative decision to freeze Charlottesville, no targeted ice deployment (not yet at least, but we stand with Minnesota), no animus toward Spies Garden in particular. At most, there was weather.
To hold otherwise is to collapse the distinction between actor and medium. If ice forming is “activity,” then gravity is negligence and entropy is malice aforethought.
What troubles me most is the misdirection. This opinion reads like a perverse version of The Open Boat by Stephen Crane, where the court is Crane’s protagonist, raging against an uncaring universe. But the universe (Mother Nature) is not that apathetic agent of indifference: it is us. We have mistaken our own choices for cosmic cruelty and then sued the weather to avoid naming the real defendant.
More troubling still is what this holding ignores. Virginia has spent decades enthusiastically gutting environmental protections, fast-tracking fossil fuel infrastructure, and, most recently, blanketing the Commonwealth with energy-hungry data centers that suck up water, strain grids, and exacerbate the very climate instability we now blame on an abstract, mythic defendant. Those choices were made deliberately. They were lobbied for. They were signed into law. Mother Nature did not zone Loudoun County.
It is convenient to sue a goddess. It is harder to confront bad policy.
This Court should not launder human environmental recklessness through a fairy tale defendant simply because she cannot file a response brief. I would find Mother Nature not liable—and suggest that if Plaintiffs seek a party capable of changing conditions, they look not to the sky, but to our lawmakers.
I respectfully dissent.
[1] The Court stands firmly with the tragically misunderstood Goofus, who could perhaps be cured via modern psychiatric treatment. Regardless, the Court thinks Goofus would be a better guy to get a light from than Gallant, who can at best be called a “tough hang.” Bill Simmons, The B.S. Report (2009).