Bumble's guide to US law
July 19th 2008 08:15
Dickens' Mr Bumble, the first to claim that the law can be an ass
Is it naïve to suggest that America is the land where litigation is the domain of the inventive? If you dream it, they will sue it.
As if the woman who sued McDonald's, and won, because her coffee was hot wasn't strange enough, we have had the story this week of a man suing his church because he fell and hit his head while worshipping. So consumed by the spirit of God was Matt Lincoln of Tennessee that he fell over, and he now wants his church to pay $2.5 million for medical bills and lost income.
Mr Lincoln said he was asking God to have "a real experience" while praying. Uh huh.
Is it innocent to suggest that the US keeps seeing these whacky insurance claims because the American legal system indulges them? The McDonald's coffee case is real - Stella Liebeck of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages after spilling a cup of McDonald's coffee into her lap in 1992. The amount was later reduced to $480,000, and then, after further legal wrestling, the case was settled secretly despite it being a public case and despite it receiving wide media coverage at the time.
These things are rarely simple and never one-sided. Details of this case, with a seemingly objective overview, can be found here. But the question remains why the US legal system, which gave the world ambulance chasing, grants so much scope to clumsy coffee drinkers and doddery church goers.
A legal system should protect the public from unscrupulous or unfair corporate practices, and it should equally protect companies from frivolous or spurious claims by the public. The McDonald's coffee case looks very much like it came down to a covert settlement negotiated by the two parties because the legal system failed to do it for them.
It's tempting to throw the book at the Amercian system. Specifically, a copy of Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, within the pages of which Mr Bumble uttered, "The law is a ass - a idiot."
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