The Los Angeles Times begins a series on “tall tales of outrageous jury awards.” The Times mentions in particular the “Winnebago cruise control lawsuit” urban legend, and suggests the tort reform movement is based on false tales like that one. One problem with their theory: Google the Winnebago lawsuit, and you’ll find that the only people vast majority of the leading sites* mentioning that entertaining (but false) story are… people pointing out that it is an urban legend. Jonathan Turley has done more to spread the story through his USA Today article insulting the tort-reform movement than anyone else. There are thousands of true tales of lawsuits on Overlawyered.com equally ludicrous, without the need to resort to the Winnebago story. It’s the litigation lobby that has made the most out of the Winnebago story, because by focusing on the occasional made-up tale, they can avoid addressing the real stories of abuse.
But you wouldn’t know it from the appallingly one-sided Los Angeles Times story. The reporter interviews Jonathan Turley, Joanne Doroshow of the trial-lawyer-friendly Center for Justice & Democracy, and tort reform opponent Theodore Eisenberg of Cornell, before giving Victor Schwartz a sentence at the end. The newspaper even cites the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit as a legitimate result by uncritically repeating the standard ATLA characterization of the litigation. “‘The irony about the McDonald’s case is that it actually, in my view, was a meaningful and worthy lawsuit,’ George Washington University’s Turley said. Yet advocates and pundits have ‘made it synonymous with court abuse.'” (Perhaps because it is court abuse. At least fourteen out of fifteen courts who have heard identical coffee-spill cases have disagreed with Turley.) (Myron Levin, Aug. 14).
[Aug. 17 update: Since I posted this, Google reshuffled its rankings, so now we have the self-referential problem that many of the leading Winnebago lawsuit sites are now referring to this page or the LA Times article. In addition, a couple of pages uncritically repeating the glurge have snuck their way into the top thirty, so it’s more accurate to say that anyone looking up the story on the Internet, where the lawsuit story is supposedly “pervasive,” can’t help but discover that it’s false. Furthermore, the point remains that (1) no serious tort-reform organization is pushing this story (except to refute it, as Overlawyered did four years ago); (2) the Winnebago story is not “widely accepted,” because one has to search through thousands of articles and opinion pieces to find a handful of columnists who made a quickly-retracted claim; (3) the LA Times ignores far more pervasive urban legends that are used to argue against tort reform; and (4) the LA Times is guilty of spreading a one-sided and misleading account of the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit. Other discussion: Aug. 14, Aug. 15, Aug. 16.]
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