SUGGESTED ANSWER TO QUESTION 16B-3

When you go to the home page of Snopes.com, you will see a large list of topics covered on the site. Since the claim made by U.S. News & World Report involves lawsuits, you should click the icon labelled Legal. You then will be taken to a page titled Legal Affairs. As you go down the list of statements on this page, you eventually will come to one that reads "Six real lawsuits showcase the need for tort reform." The red dot next to this statement indicates that it is false--that is, that the lawsuits mentioned are urban legends. If you click on the word "lawsuits" in the statement, you will be transferred to a page that describes the urban legends.

Among the six supposed lawsuits are these two:

May 2000: A Philadelphia restaurant was ordered to pay Amber Carson of Lancaster, Pennsylvania $113,500.00 after she slipped on a spilled soft drink and broke her coccyx. The beverage was on the floor because Ms. Carson threw it at her boyfriend 30 seconds earlier during an argument.

December 1997: Kara Walton of Claymont, Delaware successfully sued the owner of a night club in a neighboring city when she fell from the bathroom window to the floor and knocked out her two front teeth. This occurred while Ms. Walton was trying to sneak through the window in the ladies room to avoid paying the $3.50 cover charge. She was awarded $12,000.00 and dental expenses.

So, both of the lawsuits mentioned in the editorial in U.S. News & World Report are urban legends. Thus, even well respected magazines and newspapers may sometimes include false information received from unknown sources. In fact, the Snopes.com piece reported the following:

the "outrageous lawsuits" list has made it into the newspapers at times, which only works to add to the perception that the information given in it is reliable. In June 2002, the [New York] Daily News presented it solely as an e-mail it had received, making no statements as to its likeliness to be real or detailing any attempts that publication might have made to verify any of the entries. (Had such attempts been made, [New York] Daily News would have quickly found the article you're now reading, which originally appeared on this site a full ten months prior to the Daily News piece.)