Lawsuits and Intent

Yesterday I read that one of the Icelandic soccer players playing in the U.K. was suing a newspaper here in Iceland for reporting on his contract negotiations. I do not know anything about the details of the matter, but it struck me that this is one of the few lawsuits I have heard anything about since I have moved here to Iceland. Sure, there are criminal prosecutions sometimes, but this is more of a civil dispute, and I am assuming that the claim would be one of monetary loss or perhaps even damage to reputation. Sport figures and business figures in the U.S. sue for those sorts of things all the time.

I have always found lawsuits against newspapers for reporting this that or the other have a slim chance of succeeding, at least in the U.S. The reason for this is that the litmus test for civil lawsuits is whether or not the parties were carrying out their original intent or not. The original intent of a newspaper is to report on the news, so that makes cases against them for doing so problematic.

Now on the other hand, the woman who got millions of dollars from McDonald's because her coffee was too hot had a legitimate claim. McDonald's intent in selling her coffee was to produce a drinkable beverage, and yet somehow the settings on the brewing pot were set in such a way that the beverage became not just undrinkable, but downright dangerous. Thus the original intent was altered somewhere along the line, and it was this that made McDonald's culpable.

And of course a great deal of the rhetoric of the Tea Party has something to do with uncovering the "original intent" of the founding fathers. Though it is a hard legal thing to prove in cases like that, when we can't exactly ask them straight out, the concept of original intent still sways the pendulum in matters of fairness and rightness in the U.S. So I'll be interested to see what impact it has on legal cases here in Iceland.

Anyhow, I have not finished drinking my latte (which is a perfectly nice temperature, thank you), so I don't quite have the wherewithall to go into more legal ponderings at the moment.

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