Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Note: Close Trunk from Outside




Sometimes people shock you. In high school, I used to hear a lot about people attempting suicide by overdosing on pills or "slitting" their wrists. I used to think that was so boring*--why not do something creative?

Well, let me tell you about Ms. Daniell. She got tired of life, so she crawled into the trunk of her 1973 Ford LTD and shut the latch. Apparently, this was pretty difficult:


The design features of an automobile trunk make it well near impossible that an
adult intentionally would enter the trunk and close the lid. The
dimensions of a trunk, the height of its sill and its load floor and the efforts
to first lower the trunk lid and then to engage its latch, are among the design
features which encourage closing and latching the trunk lid while standing
outside the vehicle.

Daniell v. Ford Motor Co., 581 F. Supp. 728 (D.N.M. 1984). Thankfully, after nine days in the trunk, somebody rescued her. I don't even want to imagine nine days in a trunk. Man, how hungry would she have been?

And for you tort reformers out there, the judicial branch got this one right: it found the trunk not defective.

Man, I love law school.







*--Lately, I've been accused of being insensitive. This just goes to show that my insensitivity goes farther back than anybody thought.

1 comment:

Alan said...

That case is not quite as good as one from torts I in which a woman who sued a pharmaceutical company. Normally, this would not be altogether unusual, except that her theory of recovery was that her husband's doctor failed to warn him of the possible side effects of smoking while using a nicotine patch and the company failed to include a warning on the box despite warning of this side effect in instructions to doctors.