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In yet another celebrated case, a burglar supposedly fell through the skylight of a school, sued and was awarded $260,000, plus $1,500 a month. The full story, it seems, is that a 19-year-old man and three friends tried to take a floodlight off the roof of a California high school as a lark; he fell through the skylight and suffered loss of the use of all four limbs, plus severe brain damage. The skylight had been painted the same color as the roof and was indistinguishable at night; the school district knew that it was dangerous because someone else had been killed falling through a similar skylight at another school six months earlier, and had scheduled the skylight for repainting. It settled out of court for $260,000, plus $1,200 a month initially, to be increased by 3% each year. Still, it seems debatable whether someone should be so generously compensated for injuries, even that severe, sustained while committing a theft.
Yet whatever the merits of these and other specific cases, the insurance companies are correct in their basic contention: an evolution in liability law has led to higher jury awards and is at least partly responsible for the rise in insurance rates. One important change: the amounts assessed by juries to compensate for lost wages, medical payments and the like now make up a small part of many liability awards. Juries are increasingly likely to add on far larger amounts for noneconomic damages, that is, for such unquantifiable things as pain and suffering.
Equally significant is the growing size of punitive damages, which supposedly serve the same purpose as a don't-ever-do-anything-like-that-again fine of the defendant. Juries sometimes find that a person's actual damages amounted to only a few thousand dollars, yet decide that the corporation at fault should also pay punitive damages in the millions. In one startling case, now awaiting decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, an Alabama couple sued Aetna Life & Casualty Co., claiming that it had wrongfully refused to pay $1,650 of the wife's hospital bill. A jury awarded them punitive damages of $3.5 million, or 2,121 times the size of the disputed bill.
Courts and legislatures have steadily expanded definitions of who can be sued, and on what grounds. These days you usually can sue city hall, despite the doctrine of sovereign immunity, which holds that governments cannot be sued without their consent. State laws, and court interpretations of them, have granted that consent more and more.
Another legal concept being used ever more widely is that of strict liability, which makes possible an award of damages without any proof of negligence. Initially it was applied, for example, to businesses conducting abnormally dangerous activities. Now it has been expanded to product-liability cases: a plaintiff need not prove that the manufacturer of a product was negligent, only that the plaintiff was injured while using the product in the manner intended.