Justice Run Amok: Frivolous Lawsuits

In May, a New York appeals court rejected a lawsuit by the former mistress of prominent married rabbi Joel Goor, 75, that claimed he would owe her a $125,000 cash settlement if he broke up with her. The court said it was a contract that facilitated adultery and therefore was not enforceable, even though there were several non-adultery-related provisions. According to the New York Post, the contract called for the woman to receive a half-interest in Goor's house in the Bronx if she would "join Joel in his cultural experiences without complaining," get liposuction and "attempt with Joel's delicate guidance to speak English properly."

In April, two of the nine Baltimore-area middle-school kids implicated in a potentially fatal beating of a young couple on a transit bus last year said they would soon file lawsuits asking for $10 million each from their school (for suspending them) and the transit company (for barring them from future rides, which it did out of concern for the safety of its passengers).

Court documents revealed in March that federal judge Eduardo Robreno had fined New York mortgage banker Aaron Wider and his lawyer $29,000 for using variations of the "F word" 73 times (thus, about $367 per usage) during a contentious deposition he gave in a lawsuit brought by GMAC Bank.

Too Much Time on Their Hands: Jonathan Lee Riches is believed to be the most prolific lawsuit-filer ever to operate from behind bars. His "docket" now includes over 1,000 cases in just over two years (with eight more years to go on a federal sentence for fraud), including claims totaling several trillion dollars from "injuries" inflicted on him by such people as President Bush, Martha Stewart, Steve Jobs, Britney Spears, Tiger Woods (luggage theft), Barry Bonds (illegal moonshine production), and football player Michael Vick ($63 billion for allegedly stealing Riches's pit bulls and selling them on eBay so that Vick could in turn buy missiles from Iran).

Two ex-employees of Sioux Manufacturing Corp. revealed in a 2006 whistle-blower lawsuit that the company had been shorting the quality of the Kevlar in more than 2 million combat helmets sold to the Pentagon during 1994-2006, and in February 2008, Sioux agreed to pay $2 million to settle the dispute. The company did not contest that the Kevlar threading was lighter than the contract required, but the Pentagon said it knew of no troop injuries linked to the substandard threading. In August 2007, however, while the Pentagon was still investigating, the U.S. Air Force nonetheless contracted with Sioux to produce new Kevlar combat helmets.

The North Carolina Court of Appeals voted 2-1 in February to approve a worker compensation claim for only one of a woman's breast-implant replacements, ruling that the other implant ruptured (in a job-related accident) only because it had been improperly installed. (The dissenting judge said, even so, the compensation fund should pay for the second replacement, too, because to achieve their purpose, both breasts must be aligned properly on the chest.)

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