re: #606 SnowMonster

BTW - Apology accepted.

The system is not perfect. So which side do we error on? The idiot that spills hot coffee on himself or the company who makes a product that I can use, albeit with potential dangers (a ladder can be dangerous) that common sense should instruct you on how to use it? Also, the legal limit for proof is different in criminal vs. civil cases. The former being “reasonable doubt” and the latter being “preponderance of evidence.” I would think that if you are making $30,000 a year at 40 years of age, the max your family can receive for loss of life due to negligence of the defendant is a max of 20 years at that wage (adjusted for inflation), not hundreds of millions of dollars.

Granted, because I am a law student I may not be the most unbiased person here on the subject, but there have been plenty of studies on these supposedly exploding tort judgments. What most of them seem to find is that, with the possible exception of medical malpractice claims, tort judgments have not risen to anywhere near the levels the public believes it has. It simply is nowhere close to being as big a problem as many people see it.

Then why is there such an outcry? Because the media reports the ridiculous sounding verdicts like the McDonalds coffee case (but fails to make a big deal about when the judgment is reduced to a fraction of the original award, as it was there), and grandstanding politicians seize on that and get to rail against the out-of-control legal system.