The enormous cost to society when litigation runs rampant:
Playgrounds all over the country have been stripped of monkey bars, jungle gyms, high slides and swings, seesaws and other old-fashioned equipment once popularized by President John F. Kennedy’s physical-fitness campaign. The reason: thousands of lawsuits by people who hurt themselves at playgrounds. But some experts say that new, supposedly safer equipment is actually more dangerous because risk-loving kids will test themselves by, for instance, climbing across the top of a swing set. Other kids sit at home and get fat—and their parents sue McDonald’s.
Americans will sue each other at the slightest provocation. These are the sorts of stories that fill schoolteachers and doctors and Little League coaches with dread that the slightest mistake...will drag them into litigation hell, months or years of mounting legal fees and acrimony and uncertainty, with the remote but scary risk of losing everything....
...Americans don’t just sue big corporations or bad people. They sue doctors over misfortunes that no doctor could prevent. They sue their school officials for disciplining their children for cheating...Many of these cases do not belong in court. But clients and lawyers sue anyway, because they hope they will get lucky and win a jackpot...
Journalists Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas see a direct link between the craze for meaningless lawsuits and the decline of disclipline, order, and educational efforts in the public school system:
"Legal fear” is just as intense in the educational system. Many Americans sense that schools have become chaotic and undisciplined over time and the quality of teachers has declined. Many teachers say that the joy has gone out of their jobs.
What’s not generally known is the role of courts and Congress in creating these problems by depriving teachers and principals of the freedom to use their own common sense and best judgment. Thanks to judicial rulings and laws over the past four decades, parents can sue if their kids are suspended for even a single day—for any reason—without adequate “due process.” Well-intentioned federal disability laws have made it so difficult to suspend any emotionally disturbed student for more than 10 days—even if he is chronically violent and disruptive—that many schools don’t even try.
In Wisconsin, a chronic troublemaker was finally expelled from high school for his role in a $40,000 vandalism spree. The student’s mother hired a psychologist who diagnosed the boy with attention-deficit disorder and depressive moods. The courts ordered the school to let him return and graduate—follow the contorted logic here—because the school had failed to prove that these previously unknown disabilities had played no part in the vandalism.
School boards now fear that parents will sue for anything...Even if a school wins in court, these cases cast a pall...Unruly students sense the teachers’ fear and their own empowerment. “A kid will be acting out in class, and you touch his shoulder, and he’ll immediately come back with ‘Don’t touch me or I’ll sue'...
What the kid really means is, "Don't touch me or my parents will sue," because as others have noticed, parents are now less likely to admit to student misbehavior and will oppose even minor disciplines. This blend of parental incompentence and greed, educator anxiety, and student unruliness has created quite a noxious mess in the public K-12 system.
Posted by kswygert at December 9, 2003 11:13 AM