This Is Not How Any Of This Works

This is utter bullshit and the lawyer should be sanctioned. https://t.co/GV5v6A2pBA

— StandWithUkraineHat (@Popehat) March 12, 2022

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— Bad Legal Takes (@BadLegalTakes) March 12, 2022

Christopher Laundrie and Roberta Laundrie exhibited extreme and outrageous conduct which constitutes behavior, under the circumstances, which goes beyond all possible bounds of decency and is regarded as shocking, atrocious and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.

In order to bring a criminal action the prosecution has to show a criminal statute was violated. You can’t just say the alleged behavior was really bad. If there’s no violation of a criminal law, there’s no crime. It’s the main problem (really!) with Trump’s “lock ‘em up!” No, not that it’s dangerous; it’s stupid.

Anyway, the same standard holds for a civil suit, except you have to state a “cause of action,” an already recognized ground for invoking the court’s power and giving you relief.

There’s a long explanation there that takes a semester of Torts, at least; and probably enough years of law school to get the reasoning down. I’m not bragging, but it would be like my sister-in-law the oncologist explaining the biology of cancer. I don’t have the science to follow much beyond “cancer bad.” But basically “behavior…which goes beyond all possible bounds of decency” and may even arguably be “shocking, atrocious, and utterly intolerable,” is not something the courts recognize as a basis to allow it to grant relief. 

Whether Florida is a civilized community is another matter. I’d almost like to argue that point in court.

The point is, none of that, dramatic as it sounds, is even an allegation of intentional infliction of emotional distress (yes, that’s a tort). You won’t find “extreme and outrageous conduct” in the Restatement of Torts (2d). Which is the simplest way I know of saying this suit does not work. Period.

EOD.