Thursday, March 31, 2011

Deposit Day

Today, I'm heading over to the college of law to put down my seat deposit.  I had hoped that maybe I'd get some sort of partial scholarship, but that hasn't happened.

I think there are some schools that are an hour+ away that I could snag a scholarship to, especially if I retook the LSAT.  However, the more I think about it, this is already going to be hard enough.  No need to make it harder.

It's not a hopeless situation, though.  I just need to do very well and I may qualify for a scholarship after 1L.  Granted, I'd need to do VERY well, but who knows.

I'm done with 20 out of 29 chapters in the torts book.  I think doing all the E&E books is a good idea.  It gives a basic understanding of the topic.  Some of these things are very nuanced.  For instance, wrongful death is not at all what I thought it was prior to reading the book.  If I can grasp a lot of these concepts now, I won't have to wrestle with them later. 

Survival statutes (where either the plaintiff or the defendant die before the a trial is brought forth or concluded) are also very nuanced with some concepts that aren't necessarily that easy to grasp.

As I read though this book, it has cleared up some misconceptions I had about the law.  A lot of the litigation that we see as frivolous and stupid might not be.  Granted, it might be, too.  However, sometimes what we read in the popular media is not an accurate representation of what the claims were in the litigation.

Take the famous McDonald's coffee case (Liebeck v. McDonald's).  I always objected to the verdict because it appears that the jury handed down a product liability verdict against McDonald's.  What I felt was that all Mickey Dee's did was sell coffee, in a manner that everybody else sells gourmet coffee.

Plaintiff's counsel argued that the temperature made the coffee unnecessarily dangerous.  However, there are defenses in the law for dangerous products if, by making them less dangerous, you also change the nature of the product so that it no longer is what it is.

(For instance, a knife is inherently very dangerous.  However, to make it safer, it would no longer be a knife.)

Now, I'm not so sure it was the wrong verdict, though I think it was granted on the wrong grounds.

I think there was a failure to warn.  I doubt anybody realized that McDonald's coffee was capable of creating such severe burns.

I also think that the coffee, itself, wasn't defective as a product.  If you want good-tasting coffee, it has to be brewed and kept very, very hot.

But if you consider the product to be coffee, in a cup, with cream and sugar, (which is what the plaintiff bought and intended to consume), then it was dangerous.  It could have been made much safer if the employees at McDonald's had simply put the cream and sugar in the cup for the plaintiff.  She wouldn't have put the cup between her legs to add cream and sugar and she would not have been burned.

When you have a way to make something much safer, and you make a conscious decision not to, that's pretty much the definition of a dangerous product that should subject you to a lawsuit.

Granted, I think the plaintiff got her award based on faulty logic:  essentially, her attorneys argued that McDonald's was negligent because they served coffee too hot.  I disagree with that, entirely.  They served coffee at a temperature that is customary for gourmet coffee, and to serve it at a lower temperature would have changed the nature of the product so that it would not be suitable for it's intended use. 

(Seriously, people don't pay $2.00 and sit in a drive thru to wait for a cup of Sanka brewed at 150 degrees.)

However, they did have a duty to warn her of potential injury.  They also could have made the product much safer by simply adding the cream and sugar, themselves.  I notice that they do this, now.

Okay, enough of that.  I should have the E&E book finished by early next week and my Civ Pro E&E should arrive in the next few days.  Lots of baseball in the next few days.  So, I won't be able to do as much as I might have hoped.

I'm also thinking that Civ Pro won't be nearly as interesting as Torts, but who knows. 

I wonder if I should be outlining already.  I am highlighting the book, but putting together an outline of a 600+ page book would take some time even though it's outlined.  At this point, I'm doing a detailed reading of the E&E, but mostly am hoping to take away the major concepts. 

At this point, I'm leaving the outlining as something I'll do once class starts, using the Prof's text and the Prof's lectures as a guide on what to emphasize.  I'll probably only refer back to E&Es if there's a concept I'm having trouble with.

No comments:

Post a Comment