"This is inconsistant with the way people sit in chairs."


Okay now for an explanation of why the offensive contact thing is a big deal - and why it isn't, supposedly. (I'm referencing the blog entry just before this one.)

Far from quibbling over a mere redundancy, I think it's pretty obvious to see why the inclusion of the phrase "unconsenting contact" would be concerning - in its broadest sense people could be suing for ANY normal day to day incidental contact. Now in practice the law has limitations to prevent people from abusing this phrase - for instance there is the theory of implied consent. The example the professor gave was, if you get on the NYC subway, even if you are wearing a T-shirt that says "Don't touch me!" and get on a bullhorn and say "I do not consent to be touched", the act of getting on the subway - an institution which you *know* by its nature is one where people are squashed together like sardines - you are giving your implied consent to be touched . . . at least in so far as is unavoidable on the subway. IN addition to implied consent there's this notion about it has to be in ways "outside those of accepted social usages." So you can't sue if someone taps you on the shoulder to get your attention because that's accepted social usage.

Despite these provisions built in to supposedly protect against abuse of the statute however, this guy sued three surgeons for battery and WON. What did the surgeons do? They performed a sucessful surgery on his mother. The guy had given his consent to the first two doctors to do the surgery, and then the third guy actually performed the surgery, so the guy got all three of them. What an asshole!!! I mean it was a freaking successful surgery, that he had consented to! His argument was that the third surgeon was "too insensitive" and that he wouldn't have consented. So it was an unconsenting touch. Man that ticked me off! Well okay not actually ticked me off, but that's like one of those causes I wanted to take up in class. It's just so wrong!

This is part of why I can't decide if I like my Torts class. The professor is a younger prof who's extremely amusing in the hypotheticals he uses in class (Jackie Chan figured into an assault example yesterday), and the subject matter is fairly straightforward, unlike freaking Constitutional law. But you have to read these cases where it seems like people are suing for really dumb things, or outrageous things, or what not - as the prof says you're really seeing people at their worst. But the rules are actually fairly straightforward to apply, if you can get past the fact the inclination to judge something based on your gut instinct of what *should* be right and wrong and instead of look at what the law says it's not too hard. Just annoying when you have to say "okay by the definitions we know hold of battery the surgeon did perform a battery for successfully fixing this problem for this old lady.

But a professor who regularly makes the whole class burst into laughter is worth it, I think, given the high stress nature of first semester first year of law school. I guess you have to have a sense of humor if you're going to practice torts!

As for the quote at the top, that was one of his one liners that had the whole class laughing - it was hilarious in context. The first case we studied in torts was this woman suing this 5 year old boy for pulling the chair out from under her while she was sitting. The boy tried to give some really complicated defense explaining how he hadn't actually been trying to make her fall down. The professor was good-naturedly poking fun at this really unbelievable story (because c'mon, who hasn't tried to pull a chair out from someone when they were 5 or 6 or 7?) and that line came up.

(The woman had fractured her hip from the fall, so there were damages, and eventually the court was forced to find against the boy and award damages, but the parents are generally not held liable in intentional tort cases like battery, so all the woman could do, as Prof. Wendel said, was garnish the kid's allowance. It was, he said, a really pointless suit to bring.)