Argumentative Essay: Frivolous Lawsuits

Frivolous Lawsuits

As children our parents tried to instill in all of us good moral judgment and common sense. However, if I was to open the newspaper I would surely find any number of articles on the latest frivolous lawsuit, these being even more outrageous than the ones in yesterday’s paper. How have we as a society, which is completely capable of rational thinking, allowed ourselves to become so intertwined in the blaming game?

Americans file about 15 million lawsuits a year. (Cannell) A fourth of all lawsuits filed are either frivolous or fraudulent. Perhaps, the careless point of view about the seriousness of lawsuits is perpetuated by the false representation on the many law shows on TV, such as Ally

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. Yet, 90 percent of cases reach a settlement out of court. (Cannell)

The scary truth about lawsuits is that anyone can file a suit for anything! It is for the judge to decide if the case meets two criteria:

there must have been a wrongful act committed and the plaintiff must have suffered.

It’s the content for which they are filed that is outraging Americans. 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? In Ohio alone, 800 inmate lawsuits were filed in 1995. To defend those lawsuits it cost taxpayers $1.7 million dollars. In Ohio an inmate sued the state when he was denied soap on a rope. Another Ohio 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. Attorney General Betty D. Montgomery has teamed up with other officials to pass a bill that would limit inmate lawsuits. (Fugate) Montgomery said, ”the law does not prohibit lawsuits that may have some validity, but it does have incentives to make inmates think twice about filing what are deemed frivolous cases.”

Inmates are not the only ones who file petty lawsuits. The general public is far worse. In Orlando, The estate of a woman killed in a rental car is suing the rental car company. The person driving the car was the woman’s Irish boyfriend, who was drunk at the time of the accident. The suit alleges that the rental car company should be liable for the woman’s death because they “either knew