Opinion

When Love Your Neighbor turns into Sue Your Neighbor

Bob Dorigo Jones Senior Fellow, The Center for America
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Several years ago, as I was reading a weekly legal newspaper that very few non-lawyers like myself read, I saw a sad story about a wonderful soup kitchen in Florida called “Love Thy Neighbor.” The charity has provided meals for the homeless for twenty years, but it was being sued by a newly formed business called “Love Your Neighbor.”

Yes, that’s right. Love Your Neighbor was suing Love Thy Neighbor. Unbelievable, but the business wanted a website name that had been purchased many years earlier by the charity, and unfortunately, it was willing to sue for it.

I’ve chosen the holiday season to tell this story again for three main reasons. First, the work done by Arnold Abbott and the fine folks at Love Thy Neighbor represents the true spirit of the season, and it’s important for all of us to remember charities like this in our year-end giving. They are under enormous pressures as they carry out their generous work, and as this lawsuit shows, their time and energy, let alone their resources, must sometimes be diverted to less worthy tasks.

The second reason is that it illustrates that no one is immune from lawsuit abuse these days. When a charity called Love Thy Neighbor can be sued just because someone else wants a website name that the group had legally registered many years ago, and then have to use money that it would spend on feeding the poor to hire a lawyer to defend itself, nothing illustrates the problems with America’s “uncivil” justice system better than that.

The third reason is that it gives us a chance to reveal how efforts aimed at raising public awareness about the lawsuit problem in America really can make a difference.

Soon after we heard about this lawsuit, we brought it to the attention of a major newspaper. The newspaper decided to make it a front-page story, and the story spread nationwide. All of the media attention helped the charity find a lawyer who, in turn, donated much of his time and finally got the lawsuit dismissed.

Let’s be fair, not all victims of lawsuits are so fortunate. While I do not want to minimize the negative impact that this lawsuit had on the charity, the subsequent support this fine organization received from many individuals after we took this story from the obscurity of a legal publication to the front page of a major newspaper shows what can happen when we choose to say, “Enough is enough!”

Learn more. Go to my website at BobDorigoJones.com.

Bob Dorigo Jones, who serves as Senior Fellow for the Foundation for Fair Civil Justice, is the author of the bestselling Remove Child Before Folding, The 101 Stupidest, Silliest and Wackiest Warning Labels Ever. He is the host of a new national radio/Internet commentary, “Let’s Be Fair.”