So Sue Me!

            Hello again. It’s been a month or so since my last posting, and I’ve been silent for two reasons. The first is that I’ve been busy. Teaching summer courses can be fun and exhausting. This summer’s beginning German course was a bit of both. I think my co-instructor and friend would agree with that. What is more, I know our students would say the same. The highlight of the course, at least for me, was my getting to perfect my Australian English. When I say ‘perfect,’ I mean that I approached it linguistically, sounds and word segments and listening to the speech of our Australian student. I think after he got over the sheer strangeness of my questions and requests for help with my Australian, he rather got into it. My fiancé, who doesn’t think my Australian accent suits me very well, is resigned. Besides the summer course, I’ve settled into summer dissertation work, all to be done ahead of Fall’s job search. I’m appreciative of both my summer stipend and next year’s Max Kade fellowship, and now work can safely supersede graduate student poverty on the list of things to think about. Work aside, the dentist was fun. Three and a half hours of my life I can’t ever get back, though if it means I keep my teeth, I won’t complain too much.

The other reason I’ve kept silent is that I haven’t had much to say. I try to publish meaningfully, and I suppose we could debate the word ‘meaningful.’ All the same, writing one of these posts takes hours or days, and I like putting things out there that might leave you thinking or laughing or cursing … or all three. For today I thought about a number of things and I settled on lawsuits. Why lawsuits, you ask? No, no one’s suing me that I know of. Rather, I was thinking about the reputation of lawyers in this country. In many other countries the law is a respected and honored profession. Friends from overseas then come over here and ask me why we make all these lawyer jokes. It’s a fair question. What they don’t realize is that in many cases, lawyers bring the scorn and contempt of the American public down on themselves. I want to show you a sampling of lawsuits which, I’m convinced, could only happen here. I suppose Britain, Australia, Canada and the EU might have sunk to this level by now, but somehow I think that these lawsuits have a particularly American flavor to them. One disclaimer. If you’re a lawyer and reading this, ask yourself if you would take these cases. If not, I respect you for it. There are plenty of lawyers who are fed up with frivolous, stupid lawsuits, and you guys should get more acclaim. As I discuss these cases, I’ll try to point out the good guys amongst the legal eagles.

Case No. 1:

Woman Sues Little League Pitcher

The story’s being reprinted all over the place thanks to the Associated Press’s distribution. Since I’m not sure what copyright laws are at play for any given site, I’ll summarize, you research. Elizabeth Lloyd is suing now thirteen-year-old Matthew Migliaccio. She claims that Migliaccio, who was aiding a pitcher at the time, threw the ball recklessly and struck her, Lloyd, in the face. She’s suing him, the boy, for better than a hundred grand in actual damages plus, my favorite, pain and suffering. Funnily enough, her husband’s also suing. This happened two years ago, and the lawsuit info was published today by the AP. Now, here are some things that strike me, no pun intended, about this lawsuit. I wasn’t aware until today that you can legally sue a minor. If a minor commits a serious crime, you have to get special dispensations from the courts to try him as an adult. Not here, apparently. Suing a thirteen-year-old, let alone suing him for something that happened when he was eleven no less? I can’t say I would have thought of it. Did he vandalize her house and brake all her windows? No. Did he kill her pet snake? No. The kid threw a baseball at a little league warm-up, people. If I sound pissed, it’s because I am.

I take my hat off to Anthony Pagano, a lawyer for the family of the child. He calls the suit frivolous and without merit, and he goes on to say that it’s disgusting, his word, that you can sue somebody for something and have it get this far. I would like to say that this suit will be thrown out and that Lloyd and her husband will be tossed out of court on their … ears. But unfortunately, that may not be the case. Yes, it’s a perfectly legal and prosecutable lawsuit. It’s up to a judge to determine whether the Lloyds have a case.

Cases No. 2 and 3:

McDonalds?

These are cases we’ve been hearing about for years, but it’s interesting to look at them. In 1992, Stella Liebeck spilled some coffee down herself as she was trying to add sugar to it while sitting in her nephew’s car. Did it hurt? Well, have you ever spilled a whole cup of coffee all over yourself after it comes fresh from the coffee pot? If you have, you’ll probably answer ‘yes’ to my question. No one’s saying it didn’t hurt like hell. Is McDonalds responsible? Is it their problem? She seemed to think so. A jury agreed and awarded her a sizable chunk in damages, both actual and punitive. The case was later settled for an undisclosed figure. Nowadays if you buy a cup of coffee from McDonald’s, they actually tell you that it’s going to be hot. I learned after wisecracking about that at one location that many franchises have elected to include a verbal warning along with the label on the cup. Thanks, Stella. Now I know my coffee’s truly hot.

Here’s another McDonald’s case we all know about. Remember when you could get a supersized order of fries? Yes, I know they’re unhealthy. If you want healthy food, don’t order fries at all. The point is that you could, once upon a time, supersize your meal. It was a treat to be able to do that. Those days are over. You haven’t been asked if you wanted that supersized since 2004. The case that seems to have started it involved two New York teens who tried to claim that their obesity and diabetes was McDonald’s fault. Here is one instance where the justice system worked, because the judge tossed the case. As that venerable jurist rightly pointed out, you don’t have to eat there. You choose to. Yet, I’d say the girls actually won. Following the 2003 case and Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary, “Supersize Me,” in which he claims that this case inspired his film, supersizing disappeared. Does that mean that the New York teens won in spite of losing in court? I’d say so. So, is fast food bad for you? Of course. Should you consume it regularly without exercising as Spurlock does in his film? No. Is the company to blame if you’re irresponsible with your diet and put on the pounds? Speaking as someone who used to weigh close to 300 pounds, I say no. The fact that coffee is hot or that fast food is bad for you is nothing new, common sensical, and should prevent, not encourage, the waste of public money incurred when idiots take McDonald’s to court. Then again, this is America I’m living in.

Case No. 4:

A Few Too Many?

In December 1992, Karen Norman, aged twenty-three, got behind the wheel of her Honda and took off. Unfortunately, Karen was drunk, her blood alcohol level being 0.17 when she was found. For those of you who don’t know about BAC, that’s pretty high. She backed her car off a boat ramp and into Galveston Bay and drowned because she couldn’t unfasten her seatbelt using the emergency release. Her passenger wasn’t buckled in and so escaped the sinking car. This is the only case involving a death that I’m going to deal with. It gets interesting, because Norman’s parents sued Honda. Their claim, as I take it from available records, was that her seatbelt, not her judgment, was defective. The jury actually awarded damages in the case. It took an appeals court ruling to reverse the decision. As far as I can determine, that ended it.

It’s harder for me to be as critical here because someone did, in fact, die. Not impossible though. Who’s fault is it if I drink myself into oblivion and then try driving? You can sue a bartender who failed to cut me off. You can sue a liquor maker who put “too much” alcohol in their product which led to my drunken spree. Apparently, you can even sue the maker of my car if I drop it into the ocean and can’t get out, even though I’ve had double the legal limit and had no business behind the wheel. It’s revenge, not to put too fine a point on it. A tragedy happened, and someone has to pay. That’s how the Normans seem to have seen it. The jury saw it that way too. Not the appeals court.

I don’t know anything about tort reform. I’m not John Grisham and I’m not F. Lee Bailey. Still, what does it say about the practice of law that lawyers take on these cases? You can file a suit yourself without a lawyer, though almost no one does. Why don’t we hear more stories about lawyers and their clients getting slapped with thirty-day jail sentences for wasting a court’s time? I promise you, if a lawyer, hungry for money, knew that he could face a short jail term and a review of his license for filing frivolous lawsuits, you’d see a sharp dip in the numbers of cases like these.

These cases are, as I said before, a mere sampling. I found dozens like them. It could be that there are penalties on the books for frivolous and stupid lawsuits, but you don’t hear about them, and the legal community seems to be unaffected by them. All that tells me is that whatever those penalties are, they’re not stiff enough and/or are not enforced often enough to make them effective. Hence the lawyer jokes. I have my favorites, but I won’t quote them here. Have a good one.