The American justice system is one of the premier institutions of its kind in the world. The U.S. law gives us all a voice, and strives to protect everyone from individual citizen to massive corporation. If you have a grievance, you can file a lawsuit, and upon due consideration by a judge and jury of your peers, you might be awarded some compensation. Unfortunately, today’s society has taken this particular privilege to the extreme. Pour scalding coffee on yourself? Sue McDonald’s Corp. Break into someone’s house and injure yourself in the process? Sue the owners.
The justice system of old has become the modern-era legal system; a lead paperweight trying to hold an outrageous sea of claims and tribulations in check.
In 1994, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck was going through an Albuquerque, N.M., McDonald’s drive-through with her grandson. She ordered coffee and placed the Styrofoam cup between her legs as she prepared to add cream and sugar. As she was removing the lid, the boiling coffee spilled, severely burning her legs. After eight days in hospital, multiple skin grafts and a bill topping $11,000, Stella filled a lawsuit and was initially awarded almost $3 million in compensatory and punitive damages. The case was appealed and both parties settled privately out of court.
Was McDonald’s required to lower the temperature of their coffee? Was coffee removed from McDonald’s menus? No. In fact, the only changes to be enacted were enabling servers to add creamer and sugar rather than a customer, and an increasing in the size of the warning label announcing that hot coffee is, in fact, hot. Yes, increasing the size of a label that was already there, clearly proclaiming that spilling the scalding hot beverage may prove to be a bad choice.
This case promptly went viral, quickly setting the standard for preposterous lawsuits and ushering in a new era of self-serving litigation.
How has America gone from the cutting edge of legal innovation to being bogged down in the paperwork of a judicial bureaucracy? Simply put, people have become greedier and the system that once looked out for the little man has been adapted to encourage that greed. More time and money is spent safeguarding against the risk of lawsuits than ever before, and for good reason. Business is being handled on a dramatic scale these days; the millions and billions of dollars exchanged now are considered typical. The public sees that money changing hands and wants a piece of the action.
Another increasingly popular tactic in the suing game is mass tort litigation; a group of wronged parties gather up and file suit en masse, setting up one large combined court case. This practice, combined with the increasing costs of hiring attorneys and paying legal fees, makes settling out of court the more attractive economical option for businesses. Of course, this plays right into the hands of those filing suit: concoct a convincing-enough argument, threaten a company with a lawsuit, and gleefully rake in the six-figure financial bone thrown to you.
Obviously, it’s not quite that simple, but that doesn’t stop the hundreds of cases being filed every day.
On Friday, Justice Paul Wooten of the Manhattan State Supreme Court ruled that a young girl accused of running over an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a sidewalk two years ago can be sued for negligence. The interesting aspect of his decision? The young girl in question, Juliet Breitman, was only four years old.
Seriously, who sues a 4-year-old?
Compensation is all well and good, but at some point reality needs to kick in and we need to look at ourselves in the mirror. When does striving to attain justice for a wrongly committed become obscured by the need to get your rightful pound of flesh and then some? How can suing a 4-year-old for biking on a sidewalk solve anyone’s problems?
This is just another attempt to cash in on your own misfortune and the bad luck of others.
In life, things sometimes happen that can’t be blamed away on someone else. If a mistake made is your fault, own it. We can’t always pass the buck to someone else in a blatant attempt to cover up our own shortcomings. Instead of taking advantage of a situation and trying to make some easy money off of it, take the high, old-fashioned road and move on.
The traditional American ideal dictates that if you work hard and persevere, you can achieve great things. In the past, blue- and white-collar laborers alike worked long hours and burned the midnight oil to put food on the table, save money for college and maybe even buy the odd luxury; but now, we expect to earn those same necessities through the manipulation of situational incidents and the filing of petty, frivolous lawsuits.
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