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College Student Sues Gravity, Initially Succeeds

We mentioned several weeks ago, in Blawg Review #71, that a state court awarded a college student $179,000 after he fell out of a bunk bed, but that an appeals court had enough common sense to reverse the ruling, noting that bunk bed manufacturers do not have a duty to warn students about the risks of falling. However, we ran across a pretty entertaining commentary from the Legal Times (via Volokh) that was just too good to resist posting, in part. For the full (and amusing) diatribe, check out the Legal Times piece by William Bedsworth, a California Court of Appeal Justice.

Here’s what I understand: You have two beds. You put one over the other instead of putting them side by side. That means — according to my medieval understanding of physics and anatomy — that one person sleeps higher off the ground than the other. And if that person falls out of bed, he is more likely to hurt himself than the other guy is.

This is not only NOT rocket science, it is not any kind of science at all. It is experience. Every child finds out — the hard way — that the pain caused by falling is generally proportional to the distance fallen. And they find out about falling out of bed. We do not learn these things by studying Faraday and Newton; we learn them by studying Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner.

You don’t even have to understand gravity. All you have to understand is “down” as the second half of the common expression “fall down.” And as beds are up in comparison to floors, you can fall out of them and down onto floors. Unless you were sick the week prepositions were explained, you should know all this long before you take your SATs.

$179,001

Yet a New Jersey jury awarded a local college student $179,001 because the manufacturer of a “loft bed” failed to warn users of the bed that if they fell out of it, they could hurt themselves.

Posted by Dustin on October 3, 2006 | Comments (1)