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New Stuff and Crazy Cases #2 February 26, 2008

Posted by andyman in Uncategorized.
6 comments

I’ve been thinking a lot this morning about  so-called “conventional wisdom”.  I know I had New Year’s resolutions (which, I think I’ve failed at again) but there’s something that I have actually been working at for the past year or so, but without verbalizing it.  I realized that there are always going to be things people tell you you should do.  The collective consciousness says you should floss, you should get an education, you should get this job or that job, you should spend more time with your family, you should stop this or that bad habit.  Now, moving on, you can, of course, either agree or disagree with all of them.  I agree that I should probably floss.  I disagree that a high-paying job equals happiness.  And so on.  So, here’s the thing that is new to me.  You can probably throw out the things you disagree with, if you’ve really thought about them and decided you disagree with good reason.  But I realized that of these things people always tell me I should do, there are some that I actually agree with, yet still wasn’t doing them.

So that’s my implicit resolution for the past 6 months or so…forget the fact that other people are making the suggestions:  if there’s things that I personally believe I ought to be doing, yet I’m not, then I have to start doing them.  There’s really only a couple reasons why I wasn’t doing them in the first place, the primary one being laziness, so it’s time to make room for things I want to have happen in my life.

OK:  here’s a few of the funniest cases we’ve read recently at law school:

#1:  We read a case about a breach of contract between Wal-Mart and a company called GTI, in Haiti. The company was contracted to produce 176,217 “vine reindeer” to be sold at Wal-Mart around Christmas-time. (They were reindeer figures made out of sticks/vines, as I understand it). Anyway, I’ll jump right to funny part.  Wal-Mart claimed a breach of warranty because the reindeer were “unsuitable for sale as Christmas merchandise.” In the court proceedings, Wal-Mart claimed the reindeer were “scary-looking.” Later, they said the “reindeer were in shapes that no more resembled a reindeer than they did a rabbit.” haha.

#2:  The Chicken Salad Conundrum.     We read this case in our torts class.  A tort is, at its simplest, non-criminal damage done to a person or property.  Knocking over someone’s mailbox when you park is a tort; so is throwing your couch out the window and it accidentally hits someone.  Anyway, here was a conundrum: at a Church luncheon, the food preparation was spread out so that no one person was doing all the work.  For a large bowl of chicken salad, 9 mothers at a church volunteered to bring in chicken.  Each mother prepared her portion of chicken at home and brought it to church.  At church, the chicken was all thrown into one big bowl, and mixed with other stuff to make a chicken salad.  Then, several people at the church, eating the chicken salad, became sick and the chicken salad was discovered to have bad chicken in it.  Who do the sick people sue?  How can you sue if you don’t know who caused your injury?  Can you sue all 9 mothers, knowing that in all probability only one of them was responsibility?  (The answer was yes, all 9 mothers were sued—but the result was no, none of the 9 mothers had pay any damages.)

#3 – And Perhaps I should save this one, because it’s so good, but I’m going to give it to ya now:

MAYO
v.
SATAN AND HIS STAFF.
Misc. No. 5357.
Dec. 3, 1971.

Civil rights action against Satan and his servants who allegedly placed deliberate obstacles in plaintiff’s path and caused his downfall…

He alleges that Satan has on numerous occasions caused misery misery and unwarranted threats, against his will, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall.
Plaintiff alleges that by reason of these acts Satan has deprived him of his constitutional rights.
We feel that the application to proceed … must be denied.
It has been suggested that the Judge hearing this case was “having fun” when he wrote his dismissal.  First, he describes why you can’t sue Satan in Pennsylvania because you can’t prove that he is a resident of Pennsylvania.  Then, The court goes on to say that the only way this case could work is as a class action (where a large class of people, sometimes hundreds or thousands, join to sue a defendant)–however, the class of people wanting to sue satan would be so large as to be impracticable.  And finally, the court says that there is no evidence that Satan has received proper notice that he is being sued in court–and generally speaking you can’t sue someone unless the person knows they’re being sued.

“For the foregoing reasons we must exercise our discretion to refuse the prayer of plaintiff to proceed.”  hehe.