law related post
i don't think people are very interested in posts about things related to law school. and i'm surprised that i'm willing to write about them considering how overexposed i am. but here's a kinda gruesome example of what keeps me doing my reading every day. It starts off with a kinda dry explanation of a principle and then gets a little gross, so if my niece and/or nephews are reading (that would be amazing!), please skip this post.
In my torts class the other day we were talking about suing to recover damages for non-physical harms. it's a lot easier to get money if someone does physical harm to you or your property than if they assault you in some other way. if someone punches you in the face, its no problem to get money from them to pay for your stiches. but say someone yells a bunch of obscenities at you or says something really mean, maybe you can get them cited for harassment or whatever, but it will be very hard to convince a judge to give you any cash award to compensate you for the psychological damage. and probably for good reason. but we looked at one case where the court did allow recovery for a purely psychological damage. The story starts with an old man who dies in the hospital. His son then goes to make some arrangements with the hospital and to pick up his father's things. The hospital person hands him a bag of his father's "personal effects", and when the guy opens it he finds... a bloody severed leg. The guy assumes that it's his dad's and freaks out. The hospital clears everything up, and no they didn't cut off his dad's leg or anything, but the guy has nightmares about it for a long time and when his marriage later deteriorates he blames it on the psychological damage resulting form this experience. mark twain said something like "fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. truth isn't". anyway, that guy was allowed to recover. and that is the sort of stuff that you read about in law school.
In my torts class the other day we were talking about suing to recover damages for non-physical harms. it's a lot easier to get money if someone does physical harm to you or your property than if they assault you in some other way. if someone punches you in the face, its no problem to get money from them to pay for your stiches. but say someone yells a bunch of obscenities at you or says something really mean, maybe you can get them cited for harassment or whatever, but it will be very hard to convince a judge to give you any cash award to compensate you for the psychological damage. and probably for good reason. but we looked at one case where the court did allow recovery for a purely psychological damage. The story starts with an old man who dies in the hospital. His son then goes to make some arrangements with the hospital and to pick up his father's things. The hospital person hands him a bag of his father's "personal effects", and when the guy opens it he finds... a bloody severed leg. The guy assumes that it's his dad's and freaks out. The hospital clears everything up, and no they didn't cut off his dad's leg or anything, but the guy has nightmares about it for a long time and when his marriage later deteriorates he blames it on the psychological damage resulting form this experience. mark twain said something like "fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. truth isn't". anyway, that guy was allowed to recover. and that is the sort of stuff that you read about in law school.
posted by james at Tuesday, October 17, 2006
5 Comments:
I think I preferred the 'shabu-shabu' post. It was a lot less bloody.
So whose leg was it?
At any rate, the color-scheme of your blog causes near-instant blindness. I respectfully request that it be changed. Or I could sue you...
maybe i should have gone to law school after all. It doesn't sound so bad.
well, someday, after I go back for all the other degrees that sound interesting, maybe I can get around to it.
another gross one is commonly referred to as the "elevator decapitation" case...
is my color scheme actually bad? i'm not good at that sort of thing. i thought black was a safe bet.
It's not the colors that are bad, but white text on a black background actually gives me a headache. It's hard to read.
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