Fortune magazine calls it a disease, Time calls it an outrage, and U.S. News and World Report calls it a fad. The names differ, but the game is the same: I'll sue you. It's the all new million dollar question with no chance for double jeopardy. Anyone can be a contestant, and if the price is right, you can even get a good lawyer to play let's make a deal for you. The best way to win is to sue, for anything: for the fall, for an accident, for the weather, even for on the job pressure. The million dollar question is the fastest growing game in America, and the proliferation of lawsuits is clogging up our already overburdened courts while costing us millions of dollars and plenty of heartache. New laws and tort reform preventing frivolous lawsuits are necessary to protect the judicial system and the economy from being overwhelmed by groundless lawsuits.
Lawsuits without merit are already common. Some people prefer the family feud version. There are children suing their parents for an allowance and parents seeking a court order to make their children clean up their room. There was Tom, who sued his parents for causing his paranoia, talk about paranoid, and Mrs. Floyd, who sued her son for causing her migraine headaches which, she alleged, came from Eminem's latest. Recently, a child sued her father for grounding her from the internet and won. The courtroom is a forum for valid disputes, not the place for family squabbles, yet today there are children their parents for negligence on such grounds as being deprived of piano lessons or a trip to Europe. Although parents used to be protected from such ridiculous lawsuits, California, New York, and Illinois are now allowing a child who has reached majority to sue his parents for a wrong that occurred during their minority and in such cases the statute of limitations does not start to run until majority has been reached. Although there are some legitimate family cases, the preponderance of these lawsuits are unfounded and when families being airing their dirty linen in our courts, it's time for us to do something about it.
What we seem to be doing is picking up the cue and jumping on the bandwagon. There are so many people suing each other that the law profession has developed new specialties. We now have accident attorneys, whiplash lawyers, lawyers for children, and dogs and cats and birds, and lawyers who specialize in how to make living together look like the newlywed game. New magazines appear every day from Consumer Reports to the Police Plaintiff which features articles such as €Stop or I'll Sue.€ Everywhere signs are appearing that say € we are not responsible for damage, theft, accidents, etc.€ The ect. Is a precaution, just in case a consumer wants to play pin the suit on the donkey. And businessmen have good reason to be alarmed. Today, any kind of case can go to court. Take the case of Carl Truman, a burglar, who had his hand run over while stealing a hubcap because he failed to see the driver in the car. He won over $74,000. And then there was the case of Terrence Dickson in Pennsylvania. He robbed a house and managed to lock himself into the garage. Because the family was away on vacation, he was locked in for eight days and had to live on soda and dog food. He sued and won over half a million dollars. These cases set a dangerous precedent in a court system once designed to protect the victim from the burglar. Of course, when the plaintiff actually wins, the cases are not considered €frivolous€ under the law. A frivolous lawsuit is defined as one where there is no basis in law or fact, no merit at all.
The cases become even more bizarre when people begin suing their neighbors. Take the case of Pepsi the poodle. Pepsi is going on trial for rape. That's right, rape. His neighbors claim Pepsi snuck into their yard and took advantage of their unwilling female pooch.
That the courts are even hearing these cases is bad enough, but our congressman are busy enacting legislation that will guarantee even the most outrageous cases make it to court. For instance, have you ever been to a party where someone got drunk or everyone got loaded? What if you were throwing the party and were sued for an automobile accident resulting from one of your guess driving drunk? In many states, the host or restaurant can be held liable. That may have some legitimate connotations but what about if a couple got into a quarrel after your party or someone got picked up and didn't like it in the morning? Where does the host's liability end and individual responsibility begin? California joined New York, Iowa, and Oregon in enacting statutes that guarantee that private hosts could be liable for incidents resulting from any of their guests getting intoxicated. Now that makes me think twice about throwing a party. What about you?
Instead of trying to deal with the legislation, the statutes, the court cases, the attorneys handling these cases, we are more concerned with finding out how someone else won and doing the same thing. It becomes obvious in accident cases where everyone spins the wheel of fortune and hopes for a jackpot. In one such case, a car ran a read light and hit a bus carrying five people. When the ambulance arrived, there were twenty-eight people on the bus claiming injury. In corporate law, it's the duty of the damaged party to mitigate his losses. That means to minimize them. Today, we're making up our losses and suing everyone for them.
Part of the problem is that there are so many new grounds to sue on. One of the more popular is mental suffering. Although there are some legitimate cases for mental suffering, most of them are ridiculous. Take the case of a Los Angeles woman who claimed that the vacation she had planned for three years was ruined because American Express was slow in refunding her lost travelers checks. Regardless of the fraud and breach of contract grounds available to her, she chose to sue for emotional distress not American Express but Karl Malden, the actor, who on the company's commercial says €don't leave home without them.€
For example, in 1975, lightning struck two men visiting Sequoia National Park, killing one and damaging the other's nervous system. There was a law suit against the National Park Service demanding one million dollars for the survivor and one and a half million for the deceased victim's family. Their argument was the park management negligently failed to warn the victims against standing where lightning may strike.
Or there is always the case of the woman who collected fifty-thousand dollars in damages from San Francisco with the contention that her fall against a pole in a runaway cable car transformed her into a nymphomaniac. In another case, a woman, who admitted she couldn't qualify for a driver's license, got into an automobile accident and sued claiming the highway was improperly constructed. She was awarded a million dollars.
The million dollar question isn't so much fun when the awards start having seven digits and people begin to cheat. It even becomes tragic. We used to think that someone who saved another's life was a hero. Now people are suing the person who saved them for using improper life saving techniques. And the game doesn't end there; there's plenty of people to challenge. Television stations are sued for broadcasting news, newspapers for their stories, authors for their books, teachers for their grades, there is no one and nothing immune from lawsuits. In fact, the proliferation of lawsuits is hampering our freedoms as we head towards a lack of freedom of speech and press, a lack of freedom of action, and a lack of freedom to live our own lives. The social implications go far beyond party throwing. We have an attitude that there must be a pot of gold at the end of every whiplash. Well there must be a limit to the world's liability for an individual's risk. The number of frivolous lawsuits filed have exploded in the last few. There are so many malpractice suits against doctors that insurance com