From: "Steve Ewing" 

On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 12:57:23 -0800, Ellen K.
 wrote:

> No idea if these are true, but they are definitely amusing:
>
>> Once again, it's time to review the winners of the Annual Stella
>> Awards. The Stella's are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who
>> spilled coffee on herself and successfully sued McDonalds. That case
>> inspired the Stella Awards for the most frivolous successful lawsuits
>> in the United States.

Funny, ha ha, but let us remember that the McDonald's coffee case was
*not* frivolous:

http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.htm
=====
Some celebrated "outrageous" suits wherein judgement went for the
plaintiff prove upon closer examination to be far less
"outrageous" than originally presented in the media. (For
example, the "woman scalded by hot coffee" suit, which at first
blush looked like the height of frivolity proved to be a perfectly
legitimate action taken against a corporation that knew, thanks to a string
of similar scaldings it had quietly been paying off, that its coffee was
not just hot, but dangerously hot. The Association of Trial Lawyers of
America provides an excellent description of this case).
=====

The URL to the ATLA site on the case is:
    http://www.snopes.com/legal/lawsuits.asp#coffee
and is worth reading.

The snopes.com page includes most of the cases mentioned in your post, as
well as some real (as verified by snopes.com, anyway) cases, like this one:
=====
In 1994, a student at the University of Idaho unsuccessfully sued that
institution over his fall from a third-floor dorm window. He'd been mooning
other students when the window gave way. It was contended the University
failed to provide a safe environment for students or to properly warn them
of the dangers inherent to upper-story windows.
=====

Some stuff is funny, wrong or not, but sometimes, as in the coffee case, an
injustice is being done (at least that's how *I* feel) when these are
circulated as truth.

--
Steve 
http://www.qmss.com/sewing

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