I was forewarned about this by the guys at the "Barely Legal Blog". They were referring to workman's comp claims and how they were unintentionally hilarious. Reading the legal description probably makes them funnier because of the incongruity of the legal language against the backdrop of slapstick human behavior.
Reading about torts sometimes involves reading about people who are injured while doing things. These are the sorts of things the popular media likes to publicize. "A guy pees on a railroad track while drunk, electrocutes himself, and sues the railroad company."
I know this probably doesn't speak well for me as a human being, but I literally laugh out loud when I read some of these things. For instance, I'm reading a section on Implied Assumption of Risk. (Basically, that an activity is so obviously dangerous that if you get hurt doing it, you can't sue for negligence on the part of the person who provided the activity.)
What had me rolling today were things like:
"The plaintiff goes skating at the defendant's skating rink, is hit by a poor skater who loses control, and is injured when she hits the wall of the rink"
and
"The plaintiff takes rock climbing instruction and is injured when a seemingly solid rock is dislodged by a climber and falls on her."*
Just getting the picture in my head is enough, but if you have, say, the characters of the Simpsons doing the activities, it gets even better.
Picture Homer being hit in the head by a rock, saying "Doh!", and the kids doing that laughing thing that they do when they prank call Moe's.
I think like most things in life, this stuff can be funny if you look at it the right way. Maybe that should be my goal in all this: to try and find a way to view this stuff with levity.
* these excerpts are from "The Law of Torts, Fourth Edition, Examples & Explanations".
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