Inventory of Tort Tales
Tell us whether we should include litigation dramatized in "Erin Brockovich" or "A Civil Action" (or A Civil Action) in this list.
We are still working on this page. Please be patient.
The Mc Donald’s Coffee Lady
The top spot on our Top 10 is probably not controversial: We suspect that more Americans have heard of the "McDonald’s Coffee Lady" than any other tort tale. After all, one of the websites that we recommend for reliable anecdotes about torts -- http://www.stellaawards.com/ -- is named after Stella Liebeck, the woman who successfully sued McDonald’s Restaurants over burns inflicted by very hot coffee. Another invocation of Ms. Liebeck’s litigation may be found in pundit Joseph Perkins’s "Stella Awards" column in 1996. Chapter Six of Distorting the Law supplies many other cultural references to the Liebeck litigation, including an episode of "Seinfeld." This dispute continues to reverberate more than ten years after its litigation [Please see http://www.pointoflaw.com/archives/000402.php or http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/001397.html#more or http://www.blogdenovo.org/archives/000478.html].
One remarkable feature of the Liebeck landmark is that, in the very process of commenting on misreporting of that litigation, respected authors get the facts wrong. Professor Mark Tushnet wrote on p. 315 of A Court Divided: The Rehnquist Court and the Future of Constitutional Law (Norton, 2005) "... a jury award of $2.7 million to a woman burned by hot coffee that spilled out of a cup nestled between her legs as she was driving away from the McDonald's where she had bought the coffee." As any reader of Distorting the Law should learn, Ms. Liebeck was not driving [her grandson was] and the car was not moving.
The Skylight Burglar
The feature film "Liar Liar" (1997) recently spread this tale anew [See http://imdb.com/title/tt0119528/quotes]. According to the film a burglar fell through a skylight and injured himself only to recover thousands of dollars from the owner of the skylight. In actuality a recent graduate of a high school fell through a skylight on the roof of his alma mater. The skylight had been painted over, so he did not distinguish the sklylight from the roof. Because his school had contracted months before to board over the skylight, the school settled with the now-quadriplegic nineteen-year-old. [For far greater detail, please see Wendy Lilliedoll, An Unexpected Windfall for California’s Tort Reform Movement: Bodine v. Enterprise High School http://www.law.berkeley.edu/faculty/sugarmans/Wendy%20TortStoryFinal%20ii.doc. ]
As described at the start of Distorting the Law, Ms. Judith Richardson Haimes warned a neuroradiologist that Ms. Haimes was allergic to iodine, but the doctor injected a small amount of iodine into Ms. Haimes anyway. The resulting reactions were extreme, debilitating, and enduring. Ms. Haimes sued the doctor and the hospital for malpractice. A jury agreed that Ms. Haimes was the victim of malpractice and awarded more than $600,000 for pain and suffering and for Ms. Haimes’s loss of livelihood (sever headaches made it impossible for Ms. Haimes to continue to earn as a psychic). This led the press and President Reagan to ridicule "the psychic who claimed a CAT Scan took away her powers." Ms. Haimes never claimed that she lost her powers. [Greater detail and ample citations tot he transcripts may be found in Judith by Allen Haimes -- Ms. Haimes’s husband -- http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0938301012/qid=1093097486/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/102-6264374-7966553?v=glance&s=books.] The CAT Scan never took place. Naturally, the jury did not decide the CAT Scan that plaintiff never had eliminated psychic powers that the plaintiff said she still possessed.
One of the best sources regarding Ms. Haimes's case is still Craig.Vetter's 1986 capsule from Playboy [Volume 33, number 8 (August) p. 33] “Against the Wind: Psychic Whiplash.”
The Lawnmower Men
Here we enshrine at least two tort tales. In one, one or two fellows use a power mower to trim hedges, losing multiple fingers in the process. In the other, a Sears mower so frustrates its owner that he gives himself a heart attack trying to start it.
Concerning the claim that one or more consumers lost fingers while cleaning grass out of a running power mower or lofting a power mower to trim hedges, the only documentation we have been able to locate is Jan Harold Brunvand’s Too Good to be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999) pp. 163-164. Most tellers of these variants of "Lawnmower Men" would probably not regard official recognition of their tale as an urban legend as an honor. However, this story may not be an urban legend. Urban legends have obscure origins. This tort tale may have been created for an insurance advertisement in the 1960s.
Onthe other hand, variants on this story continue to be told. One proprietor of this site heard the "Trimming Hedges with a Power Mower, Losing Fingers for your Stupidity" story retold on Christmas night 2004! How about this version?
http://right-thinking.com/index.php/weblog/comments/8631/ on 27 December 2004.
The "Sears Lawnmower Man" largely came and went in the 1980s but some folks "know" about him. (to be completed)
Phone Booth Man
Mr. Charles Bigbee lost his leg when a drunk driver smashed into the phone booth in which Mr. Bigbee was trapped. He sued the telephone company for defects in the booth, defects that prevented Mr. Bigbee from escaping although he saw the careening car coming. That very booth had been hit by a car before, but the phone company had erected no impediment to cars speeding along a busy roadway. The case eventually settled. Mr. Bigbee testified before a congressional committee in an attempt to correct the record of his case, which President Reagan had publicized. Neither President Reagan nor his assistants would meet with Mr. Bigbee or correct the record. [See Ralph Nader and Wesley J. Smith, No Contest: Corporate Lawyers and the Perversion of Justice in America, pp. 273-274.]
Here is another story… The was this guy who needed to trim his hedges. He didn’t have a power trimmer, and he thought that using a hand trimmer took too long.
So he pulled out his lawnmower and removed the handle so it wouldn’t be in his way, started it, and grabbed it by the housing to lift it up to “mow” his hedges. Luckily he didn’t get his fingers cut off when he grabbed the housing. However once he started cutting the hedge all the little pieces of branches were thrown against his fingers with great force, causing him to drop the mower, which chopped up his legs on the way to the ground.
So he was suing the manufacturer since they did not have a sign on the mower cautioning people to not trim their hedges with it.