Bizarre Lawsuits

Miscellaneous General
1

History of United States has been ripe with examples of baseless and weird lawsuits. These lawsuits seem to be a mockery of the Judicial System and bring a shame to the whole nation. Some examples of such eccentric and unusual lawsuits are as follows:

· A Student sues the school, for providing summer homework, alleging that it creates unnecessary stress and unfair workload. (From the Associated Press, January 21, 2005)

· A couple sued the American airline claiming that they didn’t have enough leg room and subsequently were cramped aboard a flight to Paris. According to the May14, 2004 edition of Chicago-Sun times, they are seeking $1,00,000

· A train conductor settled for $8.5 million from a railroad after claiming a collision between his commuter train and a freight train worsened his alcoholism. (From the Associated Press Feb 2, 2005.)

· A woman sues a railroad on suffering minor injuries after getting hit by a train while walking along railroad tracks. She is suing the railroad for more than $30,000 as she says the railroad didn’t warn people that trains were likely to travel on the tracks she was walking along. (Associated Press Newswires, November 5, 2004)

· A child named Jose sues the school district when he sat and broke a wooden bench provided by the school authorities. He fractured his pelvis bone in the process.

Such frivolous lawsuits have led to a greater need for Tort Reforms in the Judicial System. Mr. Dick Weekley’s Texans for Lawsuit Reforms is one organization that is dedicated to bringing fairness in the judicial system

2

What I would be interested to know is how many of those cases have won. :wink:

When you’ve got a court system, you’ve to let the judge hear people’s cases. What are you supposed to do, have some clerk filter what’s important, from what isn’t? What you want to do is to have some desincentives from taking matters to court (possibly, have fines for really, clearly harass cases) and provide expedient court services.

Would you prefer to have a court system like that of Portugal, where cases take years and years to be solved, including criminal ones? There was a polemic case archived (there is a limit of 20 years or so) against a swimming pool from a family because their kid was killed by some device that was sucking water and didn’t have protection that day. The fact you have people trying to get frivilous suits on court just shows how efficient they are. If it took them a few years to get an audience, that would be a sure way not to have frivilous cases. In fact, if there wasn’t a court system, we wouldn’t have frivilous cases to worry about!

3

Good. It needs to be mocked good and hard.

How’s that? I haven’t sued anyone. Care to justify your collectivist statement?

The only way to bring fairness to the judicial system is to de-monopolize it. Until we have horizontal appeal, all the tort reforms in the world are useless.