Where peace is not a pie ...Rick's Cafe Americain

Obviously, there is something unsettling about the notion that these people are pleased (indeed, with their big smiles and thumbs-ups they look positively overjoyed) that the doctor has dropped a major organ during surgery, or that a hand has been mangled by machinery.  When I saw the woman with the baby, I was doubly disturbed by the idea that she was delighted that her child had been poisoned, presumably because it turned the little snotrag into a cash cow (of course, the baby is also giving the thumbs-up sign, and probably is smiling behind his gas mask).

I guess what I find fundamentally disturbing about these ads is that they suggest not just that a monetary recovery can adequately compensate a victim of negligence for their injury (something I think is rarely, if ever true), but that it can actually make the victim happy that they were injured.  It oversells the plaintiffs’ bar, and for the wrong reasons.  I have mixed feelings about the tort system, but I do think that personal injury suits can be an effective way to regulate certain industries or entities while also obtaining compensation for victims.  Nonetheless, to me these ads also seem to implicitly endorse the seamier side of tort law: the greed that often motivates the lawyers (and sometimes the plaintiffs) more than a desire to achieve justice.