Here we go again.
This morning I sat down at my desk and read the following headline on CNN.com:
“Vegan man sues Burger King claiming Impossible Meat Whopper is cooked on same grill as meat”
Add this to the long list of crazy and stupid lawsuits filed by crazy and stupid people and/or their lawyers for hundreds of years.
There’s even a website (funded by a little-known and under-financed lobbying outfit called the U.S. Chamber of Commerce) called facesoflawsuitabuse.org (wisely renamed from iamlawsuitabuse.org) dedicated to exposing stupid lawsuits.
Their “most recent” list of crazy lawsuits includes “Man Sues Popeyes Over Chicken Sandwich Shortage” and “Man Sues Godiva Over Labeling”.
Haha.
But, here’s the deal: All it takes to file a lawsuit is $307 and a piece of paper. Anyone—and I mean anyone—can walk into the courthouse on any day and file a lawsuit against anyone (or anything) else.
This means that some absolutely insane people (or their equally insane lawyers) are going to file lawsuits about absolutely insane things.
But it also means that you or I can walk into the courthouse on any given day and sue, let’s say, the President of the United States for using a charity for personal gain, or Purdue Pharma (and their billionaire family owners) for selling billions of dollars of highly-addictive drugs to heartland Americans who probably didn’t need them, or Johnson & Johnson for making baby powder laced with asbestos (no joke).
It’s the way the system is intended to work. Believe it or not, the founders thought the risk of a crazy person filing a stupid lawsuit was better than the risk that a really powerful person (AHEM!, like the president or the US Chamber of Commerce) would try to do something bad.
And, don’t worry Chamber of Commerce-lovers, there are still lots ways for courts to reject, dismiss, even punish people for filing stupid lawsuits. And it happens all the time.
This one’s about a Texas Supreme Court decision about a doctor who was ordered to pay $1.4 million in sanctions when he filed a stupid lawsuit against a hospital and medical school. Ouch!
There are hundreds (or thousands or hundreds of thousands) of other examples.
But no well-financed websites promoting them because—surprise!—they were all filed by morons.