Buy The Book
The latest lawsuit, as the American legal system tests the statutes, with one family hanging in the balance.
It is generally a fallacy that lawsuits are out of control in this country. Courts are generally fair to both plaintiffs and defendants. It is just that it sometimes takes time to sort out the issues. If a lawsuit is frivolous, then a judge will generally throw it out and often sanction the lawyer that filed it to boot, since filing a frivolous lawsuit is against the FRCP. Everyone does however and should get their day in court ("day" could simply mean a judge reading a compaint or other filing). One person’s frivolous or meritless claim could be another person’s legitimate one. You never know. What you read about in the media is usually not what actually happens, as most of us know.
One of the cases that is classically used as an example of a frivolous claim and exhorbitant award is the McDonald’s hot coffe case. What was presented to the public is not what happened of course. It was an elderly lady who was seriously injured when she spilled hot coffee in her lap. The issue was not whether she knew that the coffee was hot. It was that McDonalds knew that their coffee was hotter than what was safely recommended. It was found in internal memos that they opted to risk injury and a lawsuit in exchange for the coffee tasting and looking better. Also, after the large award came back from the jury, McDonalds tied up the case on appeals and the woman ended up settling to avoid years of delay for a fraction of the original award. A good example of the media completely screwing up the facts (isn’t that a surprise) and then those screwed up facts and conclusions being passed down over the years.
The judge fancy pancy verdict came in against the judge last year:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_v._Chung#Decision
That was the case about suing the dry cleaner for pants.
***
What kind of relief can the customer get from the dry cleaner? My wife’s dress may have been mangled by the dry cleaner (it shrank a bit, but they said they’d do something about it… not sure what, and we’ll know soon enough).
If it turns out that they did ruin it, is our only option to sue them?
Absolutely ridiculous. Makes my blood boil.
Did you also see that Robert Bork himself, who has advocated against consumer lawsuits (I know I’m over-generalizing, but I think I’m close), is suing the Yale Club for more than a million dollars because he slipped and fell while on his way to the podium to give a speech there?