Free Speech, Due Process and Trial by Jury
Bruce Tomaso spent more than 30 years as a writer and editor at The Dallas Morning News. When asked what positions he held there, he usually says it’s easier to list those he didn’t.
As enterprise editor on The News’s breaking news desk in the summer of 2016, he played a key role in covering the downtown shooting spree that left five police officers dead. For its coverage, The News was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Reporting.
He spent most of 1997 in Denver covering the federal criminal trials of Oklahoma City bombers Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. Four years later, he covered McVeigh’s execution.
His first major reporting assignment for The Texas Lawbook was a retrospective on the 20th anniversary of the $119.6 million verdict for 10 young men who’d been molested as children by Rudy Kos, a priest in the Catholic Diocese of Dallas. The stories earned Bruce and his Lawbook editor, Allen Pusey, the Dallas Bar Association’s 2018 Stephen Philbin Award for Feature Writing.
In 2019, he covered the seven-week medical fraud trial of nine physicians, healthcare executives and others associated with Forest Park Medical Center, a now-defunct Dallas surgical hospital.
He’s a member of the Alumni Hall of Fame at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He and his wife, Dallas attorney Patricia A. Nolan, have one grown son, who is smarter than either of them.
He will drop everything, including preposterous sums of money, to see Lady Gaga, Notre Dame football, or the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team.
You can reach Bruce at bruce.tomaso@texaslawbook.net.
In accordance with federal damages caps, U.S. District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater on Thursday reduced a jury's $2.17 million verdict against SkyWest Airlines to $300,000.
Under cross-examination, the former employee, Sarah Budd, acknowledged that she provided few details when she complained to her supervisor in 2019 about what she called pervasive crude and demeaning conduct by the overwhelmingly male force of mechanics she worked with at DFW International Airport.
Sarah Budd testified in U.S. District Court in Dallas that from the day she showed up for work in SkyWest’s maintenance department at DFW International Airport, she was subjected to a barrage of crude, demeaning, frightening comments by male co-workers.
Content warning: This article contains sexually explicit language.
After deliberating for parts of two days, jurors in the court of U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman ordered Skiplagged Inc. to pay American Airlines $4.7 million in damages for copyright infringement, and another $4.7 million in disgorged profits.
The airline is seeking at least $19.9 million in actual damages from the online company that promotes bargain-priced ‘hidden city’ ticketing. Skiplagged Inc. argues that American failed to prove there was infringement of its trademarks and deserves nothing.
Closing arguments are planned for Friday in American Airlines’s federal suit against the multimillion-dollar online site that promotes bargain-priced ‘hidden city’ ticketing.
The airline wrapped up presentation of its trademark-violation case in federal court in Fort Worth on Wednesday, the third day of testimony.
The testimony came on the second day of AA’s suit against an online site that promotes cheaper flights to users who book ‘hidden city’ tickets to destinations other than those at which they truly intend to arrive.
The testimony by Aktarer Zaman came on the first day of AA’s trademark-violation suit against Zaman’s company, which promotes the practice of booking “hidden city” flights that are contrary to the airline’s terms and conditions.
The carrier says the practice known as ‘skiplagging’ — booking a flight with a layover, then abandoning the second leg of the flight — violates airline policies and leaves travelers at risk of having their tickets declared invalid.
© Copyright 2026 The Texas Lawbook
The content on this website is protected under federal Copyright laws. Any use without the consent of The Texas Lawbook is prohibited.