Chapter 7: Civil and Administrative Law

I found the part about tort reform extremely interesting. I still thought that the number of tort cases was still increasing since 2000. However, I found out from this section that judges are actually starting to throw out these ridiculous cases of people trying to sue just to get money. A great example of this is the McDonald's case where someone spilled hot coffee on themselves and sued McDonald's for an enormous amount of money. First of all any normal human can feel that the coffee is really hot by just holding the cup. Second, she spilled the coffee on her self. This case should have been thrown out just because of those two reasons, but it actually went threw and the woman earned 640,000 dollars. This is ridiculous because even if she did need skin grafts the costs would only be around 50,000 dollars. I was happy to see that now a days these types of cases are thrown out and every year the number of tort cases lowers. I am guessing it was just a fad that is starting to die out.

I also found adverse possession interesting. If you can openly use someones property for over seven years then you can make it your property. When I read this I thought it was ridiculous at first, but really when you think about it its pretty reasonable. let me explain this more. If a piece of owned land is left and never used for seven years then it is a waste of that land. Business could be set up on that land or you could grow something on that land. In my opinion if someone chooses to waste their land like this then the land should be taken away. However it should only apply to land and not property. If you borrow something for seven years it should not become yours. The owner of the item could just have forgotten it, but with land you really cant forget you have it.