Using the Legal Law Stick

Sitting in Canada watching the US is funny sport. Generally Canadians take responsibility for their lives and don't try to sue at the drop of a hat. Americans, on the other hand, seem to have an uncommon belief that if something goes wrong, then somebody must be to blame and must be made to pay. This leads to ridiculous lawsuits. Here's an example from the site Lowering the Bar which finds humour in the law:

Bank of America Sued for 1.784 Sextillion Dollars

Apparently hoping to either (a) send a message, (b) set the new record for largest demand ever made in a lawsuit, (c) be awarded all of the money that may exist in the galaxy, in whatever human or alien denominations may be available, or (d) all of the above, Dalton Chiscolm sued Bank of America in August for "1,784 billion, trillion dollars."

Assuming that the second comma isn't a typo, and that Chiscolm actually demanded 1,784 billion trillion dollars, to my knowledge that is at least a new record for stupidly large lawsuit demands. In 2008, someone sued the federal government for more than three quadrillion dollars, but a quadrillion is only a thousand trillion. These days, maybe that just doesn't seem like a lot of money to people.

I did a bunch of the math that time, but this time I think I will stick with the numbers in the news report. A billion trillion, also known as a "sextillion," could be written as a 1 followed by 21 zeros. I know the dollar has weakened lately, but a sextillion dollars would still be a lot of money. The gross domestic product of the entire world in 2008 was only $60 trillion, so even if Chiscolm won it might be a little hard to collect.

I put this up there with

• the lawsuit against MacDonalds for coffee which was "too hot" and


• the woman who claimed to find a finger in her chili, yep, right where she placed it. She was so outraged she sued, but ended up incarcerated by a judge without a sense of humour.

Only in America.