Originally Posted by
inet32
Thank you, but I'm really asking broader questions. There have been plenty of cases over the years of altercations and assaults between passengers, so I assume by now that there must be some legal precedent or case law, and I'm hoping one of the experienced denizens of this forum might know what it is. How have confrontations between passengers been handled in the past? Also, is the flight captain's authority similar to the captain of a ship? Also, there must either be conventions or agreements citing whose laws apply. On a domestic flight is it the laws of the state you're flying over or the state the plane took off from, or what? What about an international flight? I'm really not just asking about this incident.
The facts matter, so really hard to generalize. And few of these cases would go to the point where there is a legal precedent.
As for the laws that govern, that's really too complicated a question to be answered in a forum like this. In the US, whether state common law claims are preempted will really depend on what you're alleging. Whether you have a state common law claim to start depends on whether there's an argument the airline had an obligation to do more than what it did and could have stopped the action. (Again, which depends on the facts, a lot more than which states negligence law applies.) International conventions specify the law that governs midflight.