Fitting Suits

Fitting Suits

By Ben Bova

All of you are too young to remember the America of the early twenty-first cetury, a democracy of the lawyers, by the lawyers, for the lawyers. It was impossible to sneeze in the privacy of your own home without someone suing you as a health menace. Inevitably the lawyers would also sue the home builders for failure to make the structure virus-proof. And the corporations that manufactured your air-conditioning system, wallpaper, carpeting, and facial tissues. To say nothing of the people who sold you your pet dog, cat, and/or goldfish.

It got so bad that eventually a public servant resigned her sinecure because of a lawsuit. A social worker employed by a moderate-sized midwestern city was slapped with a personal liability suit for alleged failure to do her job properly. She had advised an unemployed teenaged mother to try to find a job to support herself, since her welfare benefits were running out. Instead, the teenager went to a lawyer and sued the social worker for failure to find her more money.

Rather than face a lawsui that would have ruined her financially, whether she lost or won, the social worker resigned her position, left the state, and took up a new career. She entered law school. The teenager lived for years off the genereous verdict awarded her by a jury of equally unemployed men and women.

This was the America in which Carter C. Carter lived. We have much to thank him for.

Fitting Suits. Photo de Elena

He was, of course, totally unaware that he would change the course of history. He had no interest even in the juridical malaise of his time. All he wanted to do was to avoid dying.

Carter C. Carter had an inoperable case of cancer. “The Big C,”, it was called in those days. Se he turned to another “C,” cryonics, as a way to avoid permanent death. When declared clinically dead by a complaisant doctor (a close friend since childhood), Carter C. Carter had himslef immersed in a canister of liquid nitrogen to await the happy day when medical science could revive him, cure him, and set him out in society once more, healthily alive.

He left his life savings, a meager $100,000 (it was wroth more in those days) in a trust fund to provide for his maintenance while frozen. It would also provide a nest egg once he was awakened. He was banking heavily on compound interest.

His insurance company, however, refused to pay off on his policy, on the grounds that Carter was not finally dead. Mrs. Carter, whose sole inheritance from her husband was his $500,000 life insurance policym promptly sued the insurance company. The insurance company’s lawyers, in turn, sued the Carter estate on the grounds that he was trying to cheat, not death, but the insurance company.

After several years of legan maneuvering the suit came to court. It was decided in favor of the insurance company. Mrs. Carter promptly sued the jugde and each individual member of the jury for personal liability on the grounds that they had “willfully and deliberately denied her her legal rights.” And cased her intense pain and suffering while doing so.