Settlement

Jak

Just curious on other opinions on court settlements these days.

With peole in the US launching suits against fast food companies for making them fat :rolleyes: or cigarette companies because they did not know it was bad for them .. are things going a little too far?

There are two things I want to ask ...

Firstly, Have people lost all sense of personal responsibility for their actions? Where is the line that separates someone who trips and hurts themselves cause they are a clumsy son of a bitch and someone who trips and hurts themselves due to negligence on the part of the property owner? Do we wish to encourage a blind responsibility free society for lawyers to feed on? Economies that feed on themselves in such a way are in serious danger.

Secondly, how are the values of the awards determined and are they representative of the injury caused? Do many petty libel and slander suits actually warrant such large payouts? I feel that such disproportionate payouts are a very dangerous thing. Should payouts not be categorised somewhat and capped?

If you are wrongly refused entry to a pub one night? Do you really deserve £5000 for the 'inconvenience'?

or..

What price for a life - £5m? If no amount of money will bring back a dead relative from an accident - then why sue for ridiculous sums? In my opinion surely £5m would suffice to live a carefree existence, which is possibly the only comfort one could offer.

Cheers,

JAK.

seamus

Just leave them at it, it'll fizzle out eventually, like that SouthPark where everybody was suing everybody (literally everybody -v- everybody), and the only winner was everybody's lawyer (Kyle's Dad). Back to the old days of apologies and services I reckon. Refused from a pub? I'd accept a public apology (in a paper or somesuch). Thrown off someone else's land? You're a knacker, get a house .

You may be interested to know that after the USA, the country with the highest claims payout, per capita, is yes, you've guessed it - IRELAND. Typical :rolleyes:

Venom

I feel that most of the X is suing Y for trival matter Z type cases are just stupid people who cant accept they are responable for their own actions.

The whole McDonalds made me fat case is one such example.This should be just tossed out of court for wasting time and being stupid.

The whole case with the cigarette companies is kind of a grey area tho.Today smokers know that smoking is bad for their health,but way back in the mid 1940's and 1950's,ciggarettes were advertised as being healthy for you.Smoker's from that generation should be entitled to compensation for being misled be the companies in question.People were not as knowladgable as they are these days.

The whole value of awards is 50/50 between the jury and the judge I belive.But a cap would be a good idea.

The problem with the american legal system is that yje loser does not have to pay the legal costs of the winner.This means there is nothing stopping gob****es from suing people or business for stupid matters just in the hope of getting a few bob that they are well aware they do not deserve.

The world is just to PC these days and this has led to a society of stupid,fragile,scared to be labeled fools who just go with the crowd and are to scared to stand up for them selves when faced with a bull**** situation.

Beruthiel

I'm not surprised we're up there with the USA, it's easy money for doing nothing and a sad reflection on us.

Have people lost all sense of personal responsibility for their actions

in answer to this Jak, I believe a certain percentage of us have, you only have to look around you to see that.

Do you really deserve £5000 for the 'inconvenience'?

in answer to this, only it they beat the crap out of you

Shinji

The huge, disproportionate payouts are usually punitive damages - they're not designed as rewards for the "victims", but as punishments for the company. They're sometimes calculated as a percentage of the company's revenues or turnover.

The idea behind them is that awarding a $5000 claim against McDonalds doesn't matter a damn to them, so they won't care. They'll care if it's $50,000,000 though.

(No, I don't agree with the majority of these cases. In instances where people have just done something stupid, I don't see why companies should be penalised for not baby-sitting them properly. However, I do worry that we could swing too far the other direction, and let companies get away with some pretty atrocious stuff... Not that they don't already. McDonalds can get sued for hot coffee, but look how long its taken to get the tobacco companies into court for withholding information that proved that cigarettes killed people years ago...)

Blitzkrieger

Originally posted by Jak
Firstly, Have people lost all sense of personal responsibility for their actions?

Yes. People are selfish and inconsiderate. If they think they can get money out of something they will.

A local playground project was abandoned recently because of insurance. The community was quoted €50,000 a year. I can see why too. If a toddler falls and scrapes his knee nowadays, it's not a case of picking him up and saying "accidents happen", it's a court case. People know they'll probably get a few hundred for it and are too stupid to know that it ultimatly harms their children.

I blame the judges. Judges like to play god in 'their' courtroom and award ridiculous sums of money for ridiculous things. Remember the Canadian woman who was awarded €240,000 recently because the toilet at Trinity smelled bad? She claimed that she was suffering respiratory problems 6 months later but I don't believe it. No1 else got sick. If I was the judge I'd ask one question : "If it smelled so bad, why did you go in in the first place?"

Kappar

I do feel that people are sueing over the oddest things now but saying that I, myself have a cliam in over personal ingury in work where i was asked to trim a hard (Machine Cut ONLY) Plastic with a blade and the Blade broke of and missed then i was told to put another in and continue that one broke and cut my eyeball in to 2 halfs.

When i went the the E&E i was addmitted for a week under went 2 operations 1 for stitches and the other to put in a fake lens i then later had lazer surgey. Even nowe have poor sight in the eye.

The company had noe protective gear and did not warn me of the risks and asked me to cut the board that was ment to be cut by a machine.

I was only there 2 weeks when this happend, it was a summer job while i was in school.

I hope most will agree that this is not just a fivilous case.

I do know people that have been on a bus and the bus crashed and there was nothin' wrong with them and still sued that is wrong

DadaKopf

It's sadly become the case that more and more people are using the courts system as a means to settle personal disputes. Whatever this is a symptom of, it's placing undue pressure on the legal system, which is meeting these demands by extending its sphere of influenece over everyday life and bringing people under higher levels of control. Melodrama aside, I think the biggest danger is the breakdown of interpersonal relations it's causing - people are settling disputes by using the legal system as a wedge to win arguments, rather than settling disputes meaningfully between themselves.

Take, for example, a dispute over a party line between neighbours. Neither can decide whose side of the garden the fence should be resting on so, unable to come to a conclusion, they seek the impartial wisdom of the justice system. The Judge makes a decision whereby one neighbour wins and the other loses. What does this achieve? Nothing as neither side has meaningfully worked out a solution to which they feel mutually bound. Instead, relations between the two further degrade. Added to that is the culture of fear of litigation that's preventing people from even acting, just in case they'll be sued.

This is just a common example illustrating what litigation culture is doing to society. I think serious measures have to be taken to curb the extent to which people can bring disputes to court. The law is there for a reason, but it's not to be abused.