Law Suits
As Youth parents try to instill in all of us good moral judgment and common sense. However, when opening the newspaper you would find any number of articles on the latest pointless lawsuit, these being even more outrageous than the ones in yesterday’s paper. How has this society, which is completely capable of normal thinking, allowed ourselves to become so consumed in the blaming game?
Canadians file about 2 million lawsuits a year. A fourth of all lawsuits filed are either pointless or false. It may be that the careless point of view about the seriousness of lawsuits is caused by the false dramatization on the many law shows on TV, such as Law and Order and Boston Legal, in which the case is neatly rapped up in an hour. In reality most court cases take about 19 months from start to finish. In order to analyze our “sue happy” society one must first find out, what actually is a lawsuit? “A lawsuit is a legal action brought by a plaintiff, a person who claims to have been wronged, against a defendant, the person being sued. If a judge decides that a case has enough evidence to go to trial then the verdict may be decided by either a judge or a jury.”
In actuality, the number of lawsuits has gone up, however, the rise is not very substantial. It’s the content for which they are filed that is outraging Canadians. Many people are upset to find that convicted criminals, while in prison, have the right to sue. Why should it be that someone who has taken away the rights of another be allowed to have the right to sue? To defend those lawsuits it cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars. In New Brunswick an inmate sued the state when he was denied soap on a rope. Another British Columbian inmate filed charges after eating a turkey dinner on Thanksgiving. He sued on religious grounds saying the stuffing had turkey bits in it and eating the meat was against his religion. Criminals are not the only ones who file stupid lawsuits, the general public is far...
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