Classless Action

In my never ending obsession with highlighters and law students, I recently came upon the following news article:

UPI (that's Unreasonable Post International)

April 18, 2005
Cambridge, MA

In a stunning development in the legal world, almost 2 million current and former law students have joined in a class action lawsuit against Bic, Avery, Sanford, and every other major manufacturer of highlighters in a mass tort action which could make the tobacco lawsuits look like a slip-and-fall action brought by Lionel Hutz.

Richard ("Super Rich") Worthington III, a student at Harvard Law School, was recently diagnosed with cancer of the hand. "My doctors at Mayo Clinic couldn't figure it out. I was a healthy 23 year old student just doing my thing and then *BAM* the big 'C'!"

After extensive testing, it was discovered that Worthington, son of Urinal Cake magnate Richard ("Mega-Uber Rich") Worthington II, had a high concentration of toxins in the space between his left index finger and left thumb. Worthington and his doctors realized this was the exact spot where Worthington held the cap of his highlighters while reading assignments for law school. Every day for almost a year, Worthington would occasionally miss the cap and get highlighter all over his hand. A spectral analysis of the highlighters confirmed that they were full of carcinogenic substances, including toluene and rat poison.

Worthington asked around and discovered that several other students had pain in their non-writing hand. "I even talked with friends at the 'lesser' law schools... you know, Yale, Chicago, Stanford... and they had the same problem." Worthington hired the law firm of Huckster, Huckster & Sham to handle the suit. Plaintiffs soon swelled into the millions, to which a partner at Huckster responded "SWEET! I'm getting a new plane!"

This new scandal for the highlighter industry comes after allegations that highlighter executives have secretly conspired with law school deans to get students hooked on their highlighters for years. That story was first broken on the wildly popular weblog (or "blog") Unreasonable Man.

Dirk Brightly, spokesman for the industry, said "These allegations are preposterous. This is just another example of why tort reform is crucial in this day and age. The highlighter industry has been the bedrock on which the foundation of American jurisprudence has been built for the last 50 years! This is just a handful of students trying to make a quick buck off a deep-pocketed industry."

When questioned about how he could classify 1.8 million plaintiffs and growing as a "handful," Mr. Brightly responded "Well... obviously 'Handful' is a relative term of art." Mr. Brightly was also pressed on just how "deep" the industry's pockets were, to which he responded "Oh MAN... you wouldn't beli... NO FURTHER QUESTIONS!"