Torts: The Act of Suing People

Humans are fallible. That's the mantra we all live by. Humans make mistakes and, unfortunately, we tend to make mistakes quite often. We get distracted. We overlook minutia. Sometimes things don't align quite properly in our brains and we have moments of idiocy. Even the most detail-oriented person slips up.

I'm not a fan of suing people for minor mistakes. I think it breeds social discontent and economic problems. People become resentful when they engage in lawsuits for benign reasons and when they pay unreasonable settlements. This resentment breeds, mutates, grows, and infects them and the people they interact with. No one wins in unfair or unnecessary cases.

So when the admissions department at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY accidentally sent out acceptance letters to 122 early admissions students instead of the 46 that were actually admitted, some people got their panties in a bunch. They hastily sent out an e-mail retracting the acceptances and refunding application fees. All should have been well with the world. 

But alas, in our tort-centric world, mistakes are not easily overlooked. Some parents are threatening law suits for getting their children's hopes up.

tl;dr Really? Modern Parenting-Fail