Sue Them All!

You sweated through enough Lowcountry summers and finally bought a backyard pool. Now you float around on your own personal inland ocean, listen to your radio, and enjoy your favorite beverage. Life is good.
But while you’re at work one day, a neighborhood kid hops your fence, jumps into your pool, and drowns. Now life is bad, very bad. You’re being sued by the juvenile trespasser’s parents for owning the “attractive nuisance” that contributed to their child’s death.
America has become awash in lawsuits and our people live in the land of litigants. Many suits are probably justifiable and seek to address wrongs. Others are plain stupid and are instigated by people seeking easy money. “Bad luck” and “individual responsibility” are phrases which are losing their meaning in today’s society. A new law of legal physics has been created — “For every action or inaction there is a villain.”
Everyone who smokes tobacco knows that it is harmful to their health. Our government and other groups have been telling this to the public for decades and each pack of cigarettes carries this warning. The appropriate Latin phrase is “caveat emptor” — buyer beware! Still, some lung cancer sufferers or relatives of people who die from lung cancer bring suit against tobacco companies. Overexposure to solar radiation may cause skin cancer. I’m sure suits would be filed against the villain in this case, but no one can be found who will serve the papers.
This just in off the wire … overconsumption of alcoholic beverages will make you drunk. I believe this is one of those universal truths known by all. If you or I go to a bar and get drunk, it is our choice. If we drive home from the bar intoxicated and hit someone, it is our fault. Some people who put themselves in the above situation sue the bar. It’s always easier to blame someone else than look in a mirror.
Shifting responsibility away from ourselves probably would be reason enough to keep a stack of blank suit forms handy, but the lure of money is the loudest siren that beckons. Suing is like gold mining. When you hit, you hit big. You do not even have to pay for your grubstake. A lawyer will take your case for a percentage of the take. Forget actual damages, go for the jugular of punitive.
If you feel you have been wronged, shoot for $50 million. If the “villain” is a large corporation, double your demands. There’s a good chance a jury will award you half of what you want. Punitive damages are designed to punish, and Americans have become convinced that all corporations are evil and deserve punishment.
When we buy life insurance or insure our eyes or limbs, we affix the amount we feel we are worth in whole or in part. We pay the premiums and expect. We or our heirs to receive the agreed monetary figure if misfortune occurs. If death or dismemberment happens by means other then suicide or self- surgery, forget what we already declared as our worth. Go for the gold.
We are becoming a very unforgiving people. Lawyers cannot take all the blame for this disturbing trend, but they can shoulder a good bit of it. Besides writing most of our tort laws, they urge us to sue. Look in the Yellow Pages for some of their offered services — wrongful death, slip and fall, defective products, malpractice, dog bites, and brain injury claims.
Liability and malpractice insurance drive up prices for us all. Those who strike it rich in the suit mines do not have to concern themselves with hidden costs, but the rest of us do. Of course, if I visit your house and your dog bites me and I slip and fall off your defective porch and receive brain injury, I take this all back. I will laugh all the way to the bank while driving away in my Ford truck — until I rear-end your Pinto.
 
James David Altman lives in West Ashley and has been a contributing columnist for several publications. He is the son of the late former S.C. Republican House of Representative of John Graham Altman III. You can reach him at rabidreb@gmail.com