Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemo | Hacker News Reader

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Tort reform boils down to "I know better than the Bill of Rights, because sometimes I don't like the way people exercise their rights." It's not much different than the thinking behind the cheerleading for other amendments being eroded.

McDonalds was egregiously horrible throughout the trial which is why they were hit with punitive damages. "Granny" wanted $20k for the medical expenses of an eight day hospital stay and lost wages. The jury watched McDonalds consciously weighing more than seven hundred reports of customers with medical injuries against others customers having a hot cup of coffee at the end of a long commute and saying they would live with people getting 3rd degree burns.

Also, even if your coffee is merely warm, rather than hot it's still "drinkable." If you are some coffee snob who wants a really perfect hot cup of coffee, you aren't drinking the swill McDonalds serves.

>Tort reform boils down to "I know better than the Bill of Rights, because sometimes I don't like the way people exercise their rights." It's not much different than the thinking behind the cheerleading for other amendments being eroded.

The right to defend yourself in a criminal trial does not imply the right to bring in all kinds of inflammatory, irrelevant evidence.

Likewise, the right to a civil trial does not imply total jury autonomy in dictating the punishment. If that were so, there would be no point to eg rules of evidence, judges reducing damages, etc.

Tort reform boils down to "Getting hurt shouldn't like winning the lottery."

FTFY

Creative rephrasing of what I said. It does recap my point well.

Rather, tort reform, or more accurately some sort of limitations of what one can drag the civil courts system into, boils down to looking at who wrote the Bill of Rights, and making an estimate as to whether it is reasonable to believe they intended them to be used to obtain hundreds of thousands of dollars for spilling coffee on oneself. Or, more pointedly, hundreds of thousands in legal fees by lawyers.

Did we really have cases like this, back when the Bills' authors were still alive? Otherwise, doesn't all this brouhaha look like it boils down to little more than someone getting paid very well to conveniently misunderstand what the Bills were intended to mean? Paid better, in fact, than if instead of harassing others, they simply went out and solved the problem they perceive exist, by selling perfect temperature coffee themselves.

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