I mean, life just ain't fair. If you don't believe me, just think back to when Newt was the top dog. That
was practically their slogan. Life isn't fair, it's a rough world, take responsibility for your actions, it's a
jungle out there, yadda, yadda, yadda. You're on your own, bub. Don't let the door hit you on the ass
on the way out, cause I don't want to hear about it in court.

Unless you're a corporation, and then it's everybody else, drop 'em, bend over and grab your ankles time.

And every now and then there is a movement to make that idea the law of the land. One of the best ways
is to pass 'tort reform'. It's billed as a way to rescue the overburdened courts from all the trigger-happy
knee jerks out there that run to court every time someone else belches and doesn't say "excuse me".
It's gotten so corporations have to put so much time, energy and money into defending themselves in court,
that it takes them away from their natural humanitarian instincts. People are going so far as to slam on the
brakes of their Ford Pintos and causing someone to rear-end them. And then they have the NERVE to
run to court trying to get money because they got burned a little! And then those outrageous damages
make these companies have to charge everybody else more. Because there are WAAAAY too many
troublemakers out there rigging 'accidents' and looking to the courts for a free ride.

Or maybe not.

I'm going to give you some facts you may not have heard about the case of one of the most famous
freeloaders ever to cash in for no reason whatsoever. I want to talk about this one because in all the
years I've heard people comment on this, I've only heard one person who actually knew what she was
talking about in regard to the facts. Rush Limbaugh did a good job of firing people up about her
without actually telling the truth about this woman.

Her name is Stella Liebeck. Remember her? The one that faked being burned by coffee she got
from McDonald's and really cleaned up? That Stella Liebeck.
You know all about her because it was all over the news about seven years ago.

She was 79 years old at the time. She was in the passenger seat of her grandson's car when they
pulled into the drive-through of a McDonald's. He pulled away from the window and stopped the car
so that she could pull the lid off her coffee to add cream and sugar. The entire contents of the cup
spilled in her lap and burned her to the extent that she was hospitalized for eight days with third-degree
burns over six percent of her body. The affected area included the insides of her thighs, buttocks,
groin, and genital areas. She had to go through that really fun thing where they scrape the skin off and
had to have skin grafts. She was clearly faking it right?

Her hospital bills were in the neighborhood of $20,000. But everything was fine, because it was
because of McDonald's product that she was going through all this. They would be more than happy to
step up and do the right thing and pay her medical costs. Right? No problem for the company that
gave a home to Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar, and gives Ann Coulter all the free french fries
she can cram down her deep, deep throat, right?

No. They told her that if she wanted her hospital bills paid, she would have to take them to court.
And she did.

Among the things the jury heard:

     McDonald's had buried claims over the previous 10 years by people who had been burned by
     their coffee. Many were also victims of severe scaldings, and many were children who had been
     burned when containers of coffee fell off of counters.

     McDonald's policy was to keep their coffee at between 180 and 190 degrees, claiming that the
     high heat made the coffee taste better.

     McDonald's actively enforced that policy even though they had never studied the effects of
     those temperatures on skin.

     McDonald's claimed that their microscopic warning, something to the effect of  "Contents may
     be hot" on their styrofoam cups was sufficient warning. The cups were insulated, designed to
     keep the coffee hot without transmitting heat to the holder's hand, which would let them feel the
     extremely high temperature and hopefully realize that they really needed to be careful.

     McDonald's studies indicated that a certain number of people would be injured badly and a
     certain number of them would sue. McDonald's determined that it would be in the range of
     acceptability to let those people be scalded and stonewall any litigation (cost-benefit analysis).

     McDonald's had no intention of reducing the temperature of their coffee.
     Stella Liebeck's expert witness testified that at the temperature of McDonald's coffee,
     serious injury occurs to tissue in two to seven seconds.

The jury was appalled at McDonald's behavior and awarded Stella  $200,000 in compensatory
damages. They reduced the amount to $160,000 because they found her to be 20 percent at fault. In
punitive damages they awarded the equivalent of about 2 days worth of McDonald's coffee sales or
$2.7 million. The award was reduced on appeal, but still was in the half million dollar range.

But you knew all of that from top-notch media coverage right?

One thing you probably won't hear from the media is that these kinds of awards are actually not
common. And, like Stella's, they usually are reduced or overturned on appeal. Juries tend to have a
habit of looking at things from the corporate view, for some reason. Even when they find for the injured
party, the attitude seems to be that while the injury is real, they are not going to take too big a bite out
of the corporation's profits. The outcome of Stella's case was relatively unusual.

'Tort reform' would limit the amount of damages a plaintiff can be awarded, usually in the range of $250,000.
This is a dangerous idea, folks. In the case of a surviving relative suing for a wrongful death due to a corporation's
shoddy product or wrongdoing, money will not bring that person back. But financial compensation is the best
the legal system can do, and certain parties want to curtail that in the worst way.

Also, the prospect of massive financial loss to a corporation is often the only hammer there is to get it
to change its behavior. In the McDonald's case, for instance, it was found that the McDonald's in
Albuquerque where the incident happened had already lowered the temperature of its coffee the day
after the judgment. That loss in court was the only thing that forced them to start to care about the
health and welfare of their customers. And that was after losing only about the equivalent of 2 day's
sales of one of many products.

Our legal system is set up so that judges assess the legal facts in a case (as in an appellate court) and
juries judge the facts of a case and make their decision based on that, with the judge issuing
instructions on how to interpret the facts in relation to the law. The jury in the coffee case made their
decision based on viewing the photos of Stella's injuries and observing the nonchalant and callous
behavior of McDonald's representative in court. They felt that a wake up call to McDonald's in the
form of financial loss was very much called for. I am sure that seeing photos of Stella's injuries went a
long way toward helping them make up their minds about damages. 'Tort reform' would take away
their discretion to fix punitive damages.

McDonald's is nowhere close to alone in making decisions based on cost-benefit analysis.
(Cost-benefit means that we pay the cost and they get the benefit). The auto makers use it; the
tobacco industry uses it; the pharmaceutical companies, the federal government and an endless list of
others. In the case of the auto makers it works something like this: a design defect becomes known to
the execs. They estimate the number of lives that could potentially be lost, and calculate how much
money it would take to fix the problem in each vehicle. Then a set number is plugged in to represent
the cost in lawsuits and damages. If the cost of fixing the problem is less than the threat of losses
through the legal system, then the problem is fixed. If it would cost more to fix the problem, then the
rest of us can go straight to Hell: the product is going to be put on the market, with full knowledge that
there are problems.

Juries are the wild card in the equation. Sometimes they can force a company to do the right thing by
making it too costly to keep doing the wrong thing. Tort reform would make cost-benefit analysis
estimates a sure thing for corporations. It could be built into a company's bottom line with absolute
confidence because they would know for sure how much their wrongdoing would cost them, since tort
reform would set caps on the damages they would have to pay.

Real tort reform would affirm citizen's right to sue. Even without the type of reform being pushed, it
already is extremely difficult for an average citizen to sue a corporation. A favorite tactic is to use the
attorneys who are on retainer or on the payroll to file stalling motions with the court in an effort to drag
out the case, making it too costly for most people to pursue to a just end. Many times plaintiffs are
forced to settle their case for a fraction of the amount they were seeking, because they could not afford
real justice. And most, if not all of that often goes to cover their own legal fees.

Another tactic that real reform would go a long way to curtailing is sealed judgments. Many times when
a company does lose a court case or settles it, one key term of the settlement is that the terms remain secret.
This may not sound so bad on the surface, but the cost is huge. If a judgment or settlement is secret, it becomes
difficult if not impossible for other injured parties to use that case as a precedent in their own case. Or to even
know that the same company has been sued for the same thing before and lost. That makes it very, very difficult
to use documents or evidence in subsequent lawsuits if everything was allowed to be sealed. And, news of a
settlement could encourage others to bring their own claims, founded or not.

Companies use the threat of frivolous lawsuits against them as justification for backing the skewed
version of tort reform. They claim that the cost of litigation and paying huge judgments raises the cost
of their products and services for everyone else. The problem is, once again, they don't often have to
pay these amounts. They almost routinely are lowered substantially on appeal. But if the lawsuits are
frivolous, where do the judgments come from to begin with? And one more thing they don't want you
to know: most lawsuits against corporations are not brought by private citizens, but by other
corporations. And a large number of the ones they want to retain the right to bring are frivolous, like
the kind they claim you make.

Click on this link to find out how some of the loudest voices calling for 'tort reform' really feel about it
when they or someone close to them has been damaged:
http://www.tompaine.com/features/2001/05/08/

And please make sure you let your representatives know what you think if and when the idea comes
up again for consideration on a national level.

isaac peterson