Come now, are you proposing that the burden of proof should be on the "defendant"? Perhaps elsewhere, but surely not here at FlyerTalk, the bastion of right-thinking (i.e., correct-thinking) egalitarianism!

And thanks for the compliment -- I'm not an attorney, actually, but I appreciate your perceiving me as having those skills.

Even as a non-lawyer, however, it's easy to see that that facts of the Boccasile v Cajun Music Limited case are only remotely analogous, at best, to a situation where a bystander health care provider who just happens to be on an aircraft undertakes to help a fellow passenger in an unforeseen medical emergency. The Boccasile case involved a nurse and a physician who had volunteered to staff the "medical tent" at a music festival. In other words, the nurse and doctor were present specifically to provide medical attention for attendees who might need it, and it was their "job" (albeit an unpaid job) to do so. Boccasile’s widow argued that because the doctor and nurse had a preexisting duty to render medical treatment to her husband, they did not qualify as "Good Samaritans."

Boccasile's widow lost her case, and the Rhode Island Supreme Court affirmed that decision. I will try to find out whether the insurance companies for the doctor and nurse were successful in recovering any of their fees and expenses.

You're correct, there have been a number of relatively recent legal cases in which the "Good Samaritan" defense has been invoked -- for example: Swenson v. Waseca Mutual Insurance Co. (Minnesota., 2002), Moore v. Trevino (Texas, 2002), Hirpa v. IFC Hospitals, Inc. (Utah, 1997), and Hutton v. Logan (North Carolina, 2002), to name a few. But none of them involve fact situations that are anything more than tangentially comparable to the "in-flight" scenario that has been discussed in this thread.