Legal Facts

In West Virginia if you run over an animal, you can legally take it home and cook it for dinner!

It would take 76 work days (8 hours a day) for the average person to read the Terms and Conditions they agree to in a year.

Nancy Carlson bought a plain bag at a government surplus auction for $995. It turned out to be Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 lunar sample bag - still containing actual moon dust from the first landing. NASA demanded it back. A federal judge ruled Carlson was the legal owner. She sold it at Sotheby's for $1.8 million. The moon was in the clearance bin.

Six robbers attacked a jewelry store in Northampton, England, with sledgehammers. Ann Timson, 71, had severe arthritis. She'd bandaged her legs that morning just to get to dance class. She charged all six swinging her handbag and knocked one off his motorbike. Five were caught and sentenced to 26 years combined. Six men brought sledgehammers. She brought a purse.

A woman in New York sold her house for $650,000 after spending years telling magazines it was haunted by poltergeists. She forgot to mention the ghosts to the buyer. He sued. A New York court ruled: "As a matter of law, the house is haunted." Law schools teach it as the Ghostbusters Ruling.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a city could seize Susette Kelo's home and give the land to a private developer. The city spent $78 million demolishing the neighborhood. Pfizer left town. The developer couldn't get financing. 20 years later, the land is an empty lot.

Virginia inmate Robert Lee Brock sued himself for $5 million. His argument: getting drunk violated his own civil rights and caused him to commit crimes. Since he could not work in prison, he asked the state to pay the judgment on his behalf. The judge praised the innovative approach, then dismissed the case as totally ludicrous. He sued the one person responsible for his problems and lost.

Wells Fargo held both mortgages on a Florida condo. When it foreclosed, the law required it to sue all lien holders, including itself. So it hired one law firm to sue Wells Fargo and a second to defend Wells Fargo. The defense admitted it held the mortgage, then denied everything else.

Red Bull settled a $13 million lawsuit after a customer argued it was no better than coffee. A can has 80mg of caffeine. A cup of coffee has 150mg. Red Bull offered $10 per person to anyone who bought one since 2002. So many people claimed it that the payout dropped to $4.25.

Bill Bader's family ran Missouri's largest peach farm. Then Monsanto's herbicide drifted from neighboring fields and killed 30,000 of his trees. He sued. During discovery, 180 internal documents revealed Monsanto had warned it would drift. They sold it anyway. A jury awarded Bader $265 million. Monsanto's dicamba is still on the market.

In 1989, the tiny town of Whangamomona, New Zealand, declared itself an independent republic after being reassigned to a different regional council. They created their own passports, stamped at the local pub. Their first animal president was a goat named Billy Gumboot, who locals say won by eating the other candidates' ballot papers. He died in office. They later elected a poodle.

Jeff Bezos has one of the tallest residential fences in America at his Beverly Hills estate. It violates local height ordinances. Instead of taking it down, he pays roughly $1,000 in fines every month. The fine is pocket change for a man worth over $200 billion - so the fence stays.

After a truck smashed into Timothy Kuhn's stationary car at 45 mph, his own insurer USAA - which had already ruled him not at fault - offered him $10,000 for a traumatic brain injury. Then they intervened in his lawsuit and argued the crash was HIS fault. Days before trial they finally offered the full $250,000 policy limit. The jury gave him $114 million instead.

After 31 years at Liberty Mutual, senior case manager Joy Slagel was fired the day she returned from medical leave - over a paperwork mix-up on a Disney social media investigation. A Los Angeles jury awarded her $103 million in December 2025, the largest age discrimination verdict in US history. The jury found Liberty Mutual had acted with "malice or oppression."

A school groundskeeper spent years mixing and spraying Roundup and was twice soaked to the skin when the equipment failed. When he was diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, he sued Monsanto. A San Francisco jury awarded him $289 million in the first-ever Roundup trial - $250 million of it punitive. The day the verdict landed, Bayer lost $14 billion in stock value.

Donald Miller Jr. of Ohio disappeared in 1986 and was declared legally dead in 1994. In 2005, he showed up very much alive and asked the court to reverse his death certificate. The judge denied it — Ohio's 3-year statute of limitations to reverse a death ruling had expired. The judge told him: "I don't know where that leaves you, but you're still dead as far as the law is concerned."

In 2000, the New York Mets owed Bobby Bonilla $5.9 million. Instead of paying, they deferred it: $1.19 million per year from 2011 to 2035. The owner planned to invest the savings with his friend Bernie Madoff. Madoff turned out to be running the largest Ponzi scheme in history. The Mets are now paying Bonilla $29.8 million for a career that ended in 1999.