In the United States, we can say that any type of conflict can be brought before the courts. To the point that awards called " Stella Awards " have been created to reward the most absurd conflict that a court has had to resolve.
These awards had a relatively short duration, from 2002 to 2007.
Stella Adwards
These absurd or indefensible claims are often dismissed, but in other cases, favorable rulings are issued.
These awards are named after Stella Liebeck, a 79-year-old woman who bought a takeaway coffee from a McDonald's in 1992. The coffee was delivered to her in a cardboard cup with a plastic lid, as is customary.
The woman placed the coffee between her legs while she was travelling in the car, she had removed the plastic lid to add sugar and all the coffee spilled, causing third-degree burns.
He sued the company.
Stella's attorney alleged in the lawsuit that McDonald's had been women database grossly negligent in preparing the coffee, that it was dangerous and that it had been produced defectively.
Logic leads us to believe that Stella was negligent due to her lack of care, but the jury determined that McDonald's was 80% responsible for the incident and Stella was only 20% at fault.
The company had to compensate her with a compensation of 640,000 dollars. Since this incident in the USA all these coffee containers carry a label that warns people:
Award-winning cases
Since the coffee incident, an award has been given annually to those cases that are hard to believe. Here are some of them:
In Texas, a woman was awarded $780,000 for breaking her ankle after tripping over a child who was running around in a kitchen store. What surprised the owners of the store who had to pay her compensation the most was that the child was the woman's son.