[Infowarrior] - Litigation Nation

[Richard Forno]

Litigation Nation
By George F. Will
Sunday, January 11, 2009; Page B07

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/09/AR2009010902353.html

Called to a Florida school that could not cope, police led the  
disorderly student away in handcuffs, all 40 pounds of her 5-year-old  
self. In a Solomonic compromise, schools in Broward County, Fla.,  
banned running at recess. Long Beach, N.J., removed signs warning  
swimmers about riptides, although the oblivious tides continued. The  
warning label on a five-inch fishing lure with a three-pronged hook  
says "Harmful if swallowed"; the label on a letter opener says "Safety  
goggle recommended."

No official at the Florida school would put a restraining arm around  
the misbehaving child lest he or she be sued, as a young member of  
Teach for America was, for $20 million (the school settled for  
$90,000), because the teacher put a hand on the back of a turbulent  
seventh-grader to direct him to leave the classroom. Another teacher's  
career was ruined by accusations arising from her having positioned a  
child's fingers on a flute. A 2004 survey reported that 78 percent of  
middle and high school teachers have been subjected to legal threats  
from students bristling with rights. Students, sensing the anxiety  
that seizes schools when law intrudes into incidental relations,  
challenge teachers' authority.

Someone hurt while running at recess might sue the school district for  
inadequate supervision of the runner, as Broward County knows: It  
settled 189 playground lawsuits in five years. In Indiana, a boy did  
what boys do: He went down a slide headfirst -- and broke his femur.  
The school district was sued for inadequate supervision. Because of  
fears of such liabilities, playgrounds all over America have been  
stripped of the equipment that made them fun. So now in front of  
televisions and computer terminals sit millions of obese children,  
casualties of what attorney and author Philip Howard calls "a bubble  
wrap approach to child rearing" produced by the "cult of safety." Long  
Beach removed the warning signs because it is safer to say nothing:  
Reckless swimmers injured by the tides might sue, claiming that the  
signs were not sufficiently large or shrill or numerous, or something.  
Only a public outcry got the signs restored.
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Defensive, and ludicrous, warning labels multiply because  
aggressiveness proliferates. Lawsuits express the theory that anyone  
should be able to sue to assert that someone is culpable for even an  
idiotic action by the plaintiff, such as swallowing a fishing lure.

A predictable byproduct of this theory is brazen cynicism, encouraged  
by what Howard calls trial lawyers "congregating at the intersection  
of human tragedy and human greed." So:

A volunteer for a Catholic charity in Milwaukee ran a red light and  
seriously injured another person. Because the volunteer did not have  
deep pockets, the injured person sued the archdiocese -- successfully,  
for $17 million.

The thread connecting such lunacies is a fear permeating American  
life. It is, alas, a sensible fear arising from America's increasingly  
perverse legal culture that is the subject of what surely will be  
2009's most needed book on public affairs -- Howard's "Life Without  
Lawyers: Liberating Americans From Too Much Law."

A nation in which the proportion of lawyers in the workforce almost  
doubled between 1970 and 2000 has become ludicrously dense with laws.  
Now legal self-consciousness is stifling the exercise of judgment.  
Today's entitlement culture inculcates the idea that everyone is  
entitled to a life without danger, disappointment or aggravation. Any  
disagreement or annoyance can be aggressively "framed in the language  
of legal deprivation."

Law is essential to, but can stifle, freedom. Today, Howard writes,  
"Americans increasingly go through the day looking over their  
shoulders instead of where they want to go." The land of the free and  
the home of the brave has become "a legal minefield" through which we  
timidly tiptoe lest we trigger a legal claim. What should be routine  
daily choices and interactions are fraught with legal risk.

Time was, rights were defensive. They were to prevent government from  
doing things to you. Today, rights increasingly are offensive weapons  
wielded to inflict demands on other people, using state power for  
private aggrandizement. The multiplication of rights, each lacking  
limiting principles, multiplies nonnegotiable conflicts conducted with  
the inherent extremism of rights rhetoric, on the assumption, Howard  
says, "that society will somehow achieve equilibrium if it placates  
whomever is complaining."

But in such a society, dazed by what Howard calls "rule stupor" and  
victimized by litigious "victims," the incentives are for intensified  
complaining. Read Howard's book, and weep for the death of common sense.

georgewill at washpost.com