Personal Injury Laws: Making The World A Safer Place
Brian O Sutter
Personal Injury
Personal injury lawsuits don’t always have a stellar reputation. The media likes to sensationalize and exaggerate cases in order to play up the supposed greed or stupidity of the individuals who bring such cases to court, playing them off as frivolous and eccentric. The thing is, though, that personal injury laws exist for several very good reasons.Nonexistent Stupidity
One of the classic examples of the frivolous lawsuit is the case of Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants, which was about an incident in which the plaintiff spilled McDonald’s coffee on her lap and sustained burns. While the case has often been characterized as a woman attempting to get money from McDonalds courtesy of her own clumsiness, the fact of the matter is that the coffee really was dangerously hot.
Stella Liebeck sustained third degree burns, the worst kind, and she had to undergo skin grafts and two years of treatment before she fully recovered. When Liebeck asked McDonald’s for money to cover the medical bills and lost income her injury caused, they offered her an insultingly token amount, and so she brought them to court.
Once there, it came out that McDonald’s was knowingly keeping its coffee at an unusually hot temperature, and that they had settled similar scalding incidents before. Eventually, the jury ruled that McDonald’s was 80 percent at fault and awarded Liebeck several hundred thousand dollars. McDonald’s continues to serve very hot coffee to its customers, as do other companies (including Starbucks), but at least now it does so using sturdier cups with bigger warning labels on the lids.
Real Dangers
Whether or not you consider Liebeck’s case to be a frivolous money grab, it remains true that personal injury laws are an important aspect of the American legal system. While the criminal courts can bring a wrongdoer to justice, the only way for a victim to get compensation for his or her loss or injury is through the civil courts.
For instance, the civil case of Gottsdanker v. Cutter Laboratories was about an incident in which over 200 children contracted polio from a polio vaccine. Two of the children who survived the outbreak sued the vaccine creators, and during the trial their lawyers discovered evidence which proved that the company was cutting corners and putting thousands of children’s lives at risk. This evidence only came out because of the personal injury lawsuit.
In Borel v. Fiberboard Corp., the plaintiff’s lawyer, Ward Stephenson, was going up against asbestos suppliers who claimed that they had no idea asbestos was dangerous before Dr. Selikoff proved it definitively in 1965. However, Stephenson spent years building up a long list of articles which warned of the danger of asbestos, and which also dated back as far as three decades before Selikoff’s study. Stephenson’s efforts won his client significant damages, and the precedent he set led to even more as personal injury lawyers across the country held asbestos sellers responsible for knowingly selling the deadly mineral.
Personal injury lawsuits provide real compensation for the victims of negligent or malicious acts, and oftentimes they provide the only means of justice when the criminal courts are unable to act. If you find yourself in need of a personal injury lawyer and you live in southwest Florida, particularly in Sarasota and Charlotte counties, then contact the All Injuries Law Firm right away for a free case review. We will do our best to see to it you get the compensation you deserve.