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Trans man wins $4.7 million from school district that didn't let him use the restroom
(www.lgbtqnation.com)
this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I've always found it absurd how you can get compensated with amounts of money you would not see in a lifetime of work if you win the right type of legal case in the US so much so that purposely getting hurt to sue has become a running joke. Nothing against this particular case or individual but it always seemed like a perverse form of justice instead of, for example, making the party in the wrong change their policy to avoid similar incidents happening in the future while also covering legal fees.
The large sums of money are supposed to be punitive. They're supposed to hurt the offender enough that they won't do it again.
Unfortunately, the sums are rarely high enough to do that, and usually get cut several times in appeals.
A better method would be going after the individuals responsible for it directly, instead of the entire organization. But that'll never happen.
As the common sentiment goes:
While I get what you're saying, the best type of outcome for something like this will be a policy change to avoid similar incidents. However if you were to force policy changes through these sort of lawsuits, you would have the defense fighting for the smallest policy changes and even arguing that these small changes infringe their rights or are cruel and unusual - this would be even more complex to solve, and ineffective. The better way is to make penalties high enough that those penalties themselves motivate policy changes that will actually be effective. It puts the people being punished in charge of their next possible punishment, and this can lead to even better policy changes than simply doing it directly.
For an example, if you sued a company because you stepped on a nail left by their construction crew (which was proven to be willful negligence), they might argue that they can simply sweep up any remaining nails. By changing that to a $1 million fine, they're going to not only remove all of the nails, but make sure they never get left on the floor ever again. You can't get this effect by simply ruling "no more nails on the floor."
Yeah, I mostly used that example since it was a school district so it would be feasible to enact actual policy change that would punish violations internally. I agree that for private corporations this does not work but for public institutions it's also not as effective of a deterrent as it could be due to lack of direct financial accountability.
To paraphrase Churchill, it's the worst possible system, except for all the others,
This isn't entirely unique to the USA. It takes different, and even worse forms, in some other countries.
In China for car accidents theres a history of the offender intentionally killing the injury victim to avoid having to pay for a lifetime of disability payments. Its cheaper for the offender to pay a one-time fine for killing than it is to pay for years or decades to support the victim financially. source