Legal Commentary

If the law?s central theme is justice, why do we teach law students with a canon of cases that leave the reader with one common refrain: ?Wow. That person got screwed.?

Why? Because, to borrow a phrase from my own Contracts teacher, Prof. Gerald Frug, ?It?s delicious.?

Who is your favorite tragic figure from the casebooks? I invite your nominations in the comments to this post. After receiving your input, I?ll compile a list of candidates, and then we will elect the Greatest All-Time Victim in Caselaw History. (Come back to this post to see the results - I?ll append a link to follow-on reports.)

To qualify, your luckless loser must have been left substantially without the remedy sought in court. In other words, the qualifying event is not the original injury that occasioned the lawsuit, but, rather, the magnitude of tragedy occasioned by that person?s being let down by our system of laws.

And one other note. The point here is not to find someone whose misfortune resulted from a misapplication of the law or bad judging. Quite to the contrary, the ideal victim would, I think, be found in a case where the law was correctly applied, albeit with tragic results.

I?ll kick it off with my one nomination of my own:

From Civil Procedure the married couple of E.L. and Annie Mottley, from the case of Louisville & Nashville Railroad Co. v. Mottley. Seriously injured in a train collision in 1871, the Mottleys released their claims against the railroad in exchange for two lifetime railroad passes. When the federal government banned such passes in 1906, the railroad reneged on its deal, and the Mottleys sued in federal court. Their case wound up in the U.S. Supreme Court, which dismissed the case for lack of federal-question jurisdiction. See 211 U.S. 149 (1908). So the Mottleys re-filed in Kentucky state court and won back their passes, only to wind up in the U.S. Supreme Court AGAIN. See 219 U.S. 467 (1911). This time, the high court ruled on the federal question (i.e., the one that wasn?t important enough to confer federal-question jurisdiction a few years prior) and decided the Mottleys couldn?t have their railroad passes after all.

I hope they got a good deal on attorneys fees.