POLI 342 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Dubuque, Iowa, Tort Reform, Punitive Damages
11 May 2018
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April 3rd and 5th - Political action and the legal system
The American legal system
• Is there a culture of litigiousness - a “suing culture” - proper to the United States?
• If so, what are its root causes, and what are its impacts?
Liebeck v McDonald’s Restaurants (1994)
• The “McDonald’s coffee case”
• “Poster child of excessive lawsuits)
• Stella Liebeck awarded $2.7 million
• However:
• She was actually awarded $160,000 in compensation, the $2.7 was awarded as punitive
damages
• Punitive damages were reduced to $480,000 by the judge, McDonald’s appealed, but
settled out of court
Sledding bans across the U.S.
• A large number of cities how enforce sledding bans across the U.S
• Dubuque, Iowa: has 50 parks accessible for winter activities, but banned sledding in all but 2 of
them, citing the impossibility for the city to have immunity to lawsuits in other municipalities
• Omaha, Nebraska: had to pay $2.4 million to a family after their daughter’s sled hit a tree, leaving
her paralyzed from the chest down
• Boone, Iowa: paid $12 million after a sledder her a concrete cube at the hill’s base
• Paxton, Illinois: removed an actual hill in a city park
Possible roots for the “suing culture”
• What are the legal and economic structures and incentives in place that promote a culture of
litigiousness?
• No “loser pays legal fees” rule
• The number of lawyers
• Cars and suburbs
• More rules and better enforcement elsewhere (which would imply that American prefer
litigiousness to enforcement)
• Jury trials
Impacts of this phenomenon
• Teachers and health workers
• Malpractice of lawsuits and “defensive medicine”
• Price of litigations insurance
Does the “suing culture” really exist?
• Number of lawyers:
• 1 for 275 peoples, compared with 450 in Canada and 1,403 in France
• However:
• Ramseyer & Rasmusen (2010) study
• Litigation rates per 1,000 people
• Reasons why Americans sure more rarely (Engel)
• Responses to pain consistent with the idea of people not taking action
• Popular culture
• Perceptions of individual responsibility and of “natural” accidents
• Fixing the compensation culture also leads to arguments for tort reform, but there are critics:
• May shield businesses (especially large corporations) from sues for fraud, negligence,
medical malpractice, etc.
• Tort reform advocates exaggerate the costs and ignore the benefits of the current tort
system
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