Exculpations Crybabies: Eternal Victims

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The University of California has a docket of similar suits long enough to keep the courts busy for years. Ten university attorneys, in fact, work full time solely on cases involving employees. In one recent imbroglio, a U.C. Santa Cruz employee, citing emotional stress, sued a colleague and the university after the colleague wrote a message on official stationery labeling him a racist. The plaintiff lost his case in two courts and plans to appeal to the state supreme court. He has meanwhile retired on a disability pension.

These and similar actions are fertilized by new rules of comparative negligence that allow a plaintiff to recover damages in a lawsuit even if he is partly at fault; this means, for example, that a drunk driver who demolishes an illegally parked car can claim some damages from the defendant's insurer. Changes in ethical guidelines, moreover, permit attorneys to advertise for clients -- all of which has made the lawsuit business a battleground for greedy practitioners. The survey firm Jury Verdict Research estimates that jury awards to plaintiffs of $1 million or more leaped from 22 in 1974 to 558 in 1989. Those figures may be one reason why Congress is now considering a national tort-reform law aimed at restricting frivolous litigation. There is surely something new in the American air that inspired the estate of Christopher Duffy of Framingham, Mass., who stole a car from a parking lot and got killed in a subsequent accident, to sue the proprietor of the lot for failing to prevent auto thefts. The same ingredient in the Zeitgeist must have affected the Philadelphia jury described by journalist Walter Olson in a new book, The Litigation Explosion. The jury awarded $986,000 in 1986 to Judith Haimes, a psychic who was said to be on good terms with John Milton (1608-1674). Haimes sued her doctor and a hospital, alleging that she suffered an allergic reaction and intense headaches from a dye used in a 1976 CAT scan and as a consequence could not use her psychic powers. Paradise lost. The judge set aside the award; the case ground on until it was dismissed on appeal last February.

How many ways can crybabies parse shame and blame? In San Francisco last month, a motley flock turned out to picket the classic Disney movie Fantasia. One man complained that the spooky Night on Bald Mountain scene had terrified his child. Members of an organization called Dieters United objected to the tutu-clad hippos frolicking to the music of Dance of the Hours; the protesters felt the sequence ridiculed fat people. Conservationists were appalled at the waste of water in Sorcerer's Apprentice. Fundamentalist Christians bewailed ) the depiction of evolution in Rite of Spring. Antidrug forces suspected something subliminally prodrug in the Nutcracker Suite episode featuring dancing mushrooms. Only Fantasia conductor Leopold Stokowski escaped chastisement, perhaps because he is dead.

But not all instances of victimology are so ludicrous. Two men hiding in a New York City subway tunnel were burned when they accidentally touched an electrified rail; a jury threw $13 million at them. The city is appealing the award. Joel Steinberg, the wife beater and child abuser who was convicted in New York City in 1989 of the battering death of his six-year-old illegally adopted daughter Lisa, told the court, "I'm a victim, as was everyone else who knew Lisa."