One of my favorite kid friendly, safe for work jokes:

Q: Moose walks into a bar. What’s he say?
A: Ouch.

If you like that one, how about this one:

Q:Woman buys an expensive seat at the ballpark. What’s she say?
A: Get me a class action lawyer!

And if you like that one, you will like my pal Randy Maniloff’s (even if he did blow me off for dinner the last time I was in Philadelphia) Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend on the Oakland A’s ticket holder and her lawyer who have filed a class action suit against Major League Baseball alleging that protective netting should be installed the length of the baseline seating in ball parks. Now, I am not one to make fun of lawsuits by referencing the old saw about the woman who was burnt by McDonald’s coffee and received a large jury verdict afterwards, which tort reform people always try to use to support their claims that we need to crack down on plaintiffs and their lawyers; as I have discussed before, if you look behind the self-serving rhetoric about that case, you find that it doesn’t actually demonstrate a misuse of the court system. But Randy makes very good points about the frivolity of this particular class action suit, ranging from the fact that the plaintiff has elected expensive seats over cheaper seats where there is no possible risk of injury from foul balls, rendering her complaints self-serving (to say the least), to the fact that the case probably cannot survive the types of filtering events (such as motions to dismiss, class certification standards, etc.) that serve to weed out non-meritorious class actions.

But what is most interesting about Randy’s Op-Ed is that he notes the real, fundamental problem with the proposed class action, which is that the law has long applied a sort of caveat emptor approach to the risks faced by baseball fans of being hit by foul balls and broken bats: as Randy discusses, the law pretty much says such fans are not entitled to sue over such harms, on the thesis that they assume the risk by going to the ballpark. This has its own interesting subtext, having to do with the extent to which baseball is woven into the national fabric and the extent to which the development of the common law reflects that fact. But that is a story for another day, and one best explored by a more skeptical writer than me.

The more telling and immediate issue is a point that underlies Randy’s piece, which is that the law maintains such principles disfavoring claims of injuries by fans. One has to ask, though, whether today such a legal approach should continue, as team owners take every step open to them to increase profits, including – such as at Fenway Park – adding seats that are ever closer to the field (and which thus increase the risk of injury, by placing paying customers ever closer to the action, even though – unlike the twenty something world-class athletes they are now only a few feet away from on the field – they certainly lack the reactions to avoid batted balls and the like). At what point does the quest for profits by increasing the risks to customers require revisiting any rules that make it difficult for an injured baseball fan to sue if seriously hurt by a batted ball? If – taking this example from cases I have tried – a company makes a product that is more dangerous than necessary so that it can make more money from its sale, the law doesn’t bar an injured customer from asking for recompense. Should baseball team owners who have increased their customers’ risks in the pursuit of ever higher revenue be immune from answering for it in court in the same way? I don’t profess to have studied the question enough to know the answer, but I have certainly studied it enough to ask the question.