Classic Lolsuits: Contracts

Just about every major area of law has a classic lolsuit that is assigned to first-year law students to illustrate foundational legal concepts and teach them to stare into the abyss of human suffering that is the law.

Hawkins v. McGee is one such case.

The case is about George Hawkins, a boy who one day decided to shake hands with a live electrical wire and was left with a badly scarred right palm. He was forced to live with this scar for nine years, a time period he would later look back on and refer to as "the good old days."

This scar came to the attention of a Dr. McGee, who went to George's father and told him he could give the boy a "one hundred percent perfect hand." Mr. Hawkins was skeptical at first, probably because (and I'm just speculating here) this was an unsolicited offer to perform plastic surgery and he's living in the mid-1920's, but what the hell, sometimes you gotta roll the dice, right? Besides, he got a 100% guarantee, which is the kind of thing normally reserved for mattresses and Snuggies.

It was later surmised that McGee included this guarantee in his sales pitch because he "sought an opportunity to 'experiment on skin grafting,' in which he had little previous experience." This probably sounds sketchy, especially since the first documented skin graft was performed barely ten years prior on a wounded British soldier who wanted to look like Zorro, but that operation was successful, so you know, how hard can it be? McGee didn't think the skin graft would be a big deal, and promised Hawkins his son would be out of the hospital in three or four days and able to work again a few days later.

As it turns out, George was in the hospital for three months, and "the new tissue grafted upon said hand became matted, unsightly, and so healed and attached to said hand as to practically fill the hand with an unsightly growth, restricting the motion of the plaintiff's hand so that said hand has become useless to the plaintiff wherein, previous to said operation, was a practical, useful hand."

Originally a jury awarded George a fair sum of $300 for this completely understandable mistake, but a new trial was ordered and George ended up getting a fat settlement of $1400 (almost $17,500 in today's money!). So what did George do with this windfall? Personally, I would probably be cruising around in a brand new Hyundai with all the bells and whistles, waving to my envious friends with my hairy club-hand. Not George: he was such a diva that he blew the whole thing going all the way to Montreal in an attempt to find some plastic surgeons that could make his hand look somewhat humanesque.

They couldn't help him either.