CALIFORNIA IN BRIEF : SAN FRANCISCO : Woman in Tub Gets New Day in Court

The state Supreme Court is giving a woman another chance to persuade a jury she suffered emotional harm when a photo taken for an art class, showing her in a bathtub partly covered by red Jell-O, wound up in a sex magazine. The justices unanimously denied an appeal by High Society Magazine from a lower-court ruling that granted Elizabeth Mitchell a new trial after overturning her $275,000 award for punitive damages. The new trial is to decide whether she should get damages for emotional distress caused by invasion of privacy. The case dates to 1978, when Mitchell was a student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. According to a state appeals court, she asked a photographer to take the pictures. Mitchell picked one picture for her project. She gave the photographer permission to show one or two other photos only in his photography class, the court said.