The lawyers will understand. “Yeah, that’s pretty much where I live.” But I want to take the rest of you deep inside the world of law, where words get minced, teeth get gnashed, and Alice gets invoked. A world, where, if you don’t like the definition of a word, you just make up your own.
We begin on a sunny day in Ohio. A woman is walking her dog. Suddenly, a Ford Fusion crashes into her left knee, throwing her into the air. She lands on the Fusion’s hood. The driver’s insurance company, State Farm, stipulates that their insured driver caused the accident. They also stipulate that the impact threw the woman onto the Fusion’s hood, where she “sustained further bodily injuries.” So everybody agrees that the woman has a right to recover for her injuries; a simple case, one would think: Let’s just settle, shake hands, and head to yoga. But these are lawyers, and this is the law.
State Farm promises it will pay for the woman’s “bodily injuries,” but we have two sets of "bodily injuries": one set sustained when the Fusion hit her, sending her into the air, and another set when she landed on the hood. State Farm will pay for the first set, but not for the second, because lying on the hood, the woman was not “occupying" the Fusion, and the policy pays for the second set of injuries only if the plaintiff “occupied” the car. You with me?
The court acknowledges that “Occupants are normally inside vehicles, not on them,” seeming to side with State Farm, and proving that, contrary to popular belief, judges have a sense of humor. Yet this three-judge panel rules that the woman on the hood did “occupy” the car. How can that be?
These are the cases that arise from the legal netherworld into the bright lights of the media and make people crazy. They make lawyers crazy, too, but we go to school for three years to learn how to deal with the insanity. It’s why every year thousands of us invoke Alice in Wonderland in our briefs as the only way to explain some bizarre twist of logic. (Ask any judge or judge’s clerk how often Alice appears in chambers.) State Farm’s lawyer calls the idea “ridiculous,” which of course it is; except it’s his own client’s fault. Here’s the key observation in the court’s opinion:
“[T]he parties to a contract can define its terms as they wish; and State Farm has done so here. Its policy for the Fusion defines ‘occupying’ as ‘in, on, entering or alighting from.’” (emphasis mine)
