When you are in the land of Ohio and the OSC decides. About a year and a half ago, in a ruling striking down the Ohio state version of Chevron deference, the conservative majority on the state supreme court noted that “text should be given its contemporaneous and customary meaning.” Yesterday, in a 4-3 opinion, the conservative justices decided that “boneless wings” can have bones in them. Welcome to Buffalo Wildly Deadly Wings! Michael Berkheimer ordered boneless wings from a restaurant and ended up swallowing a roughly 1-3/8-inch chicken bone. It tore his esophagus and caused a bacterial infection in his thoracic cavity. He sued the restaurant, the supplier, and the chicken farm. Rather than allow a jury to sort out liability, the
Topics:
Bill Haskell considers the following as important: boneless wings, Education, law
This could be interesting, too:
Bill Haskell writes The spider’s web called Healthcare Insurance
Joel Eissenberg writes The business model of modern universities
Lars Pålsson Syll writes Debunking mathematical economics
Ken Melvin writes Public vs Private Wealth – Breaking Free
When you are in the land of Ohio and the OSC decides.
About a year and a half ago, in a ruling striking down the Ohio state version of Chevron deference, the conservative majority on the state supreme court noted that “text should be given its contemporaneous and customary meaning.”
Yesterday, in a 4-3 opinion, the conservative justices decided that “boneless wings” can have bones in them.
Welcome to Buffalo Wildly Deadly Wings!
Michael Berkheimer ordered boneless wings from a restaurant and ended up swallowing a roughly 1-3/8-inch chicken bone. It tore his esophagus and caused a bacterial infection in his thoracic cavity. He sued the restaurant, the supplier, and the chicken farm. Rather than allow a jury to sort out liability, the state supreme court ruled that no jury could possibly believe a boneless wing would be free of bones.
AB: The last line in the paragraph above is funny and so true. The state of Ohio supreme court . . .
And regarding the food item’s being called a “boneless wing,” it is common sense that that label was merely a description of the cooking style. A diner reading “boneless wings” on a menu would no more believe that the restaurant was warranting the absence of bones in the items than believe that the items were made from chicken wings, just as a person eating “chicken fingers” would know that he had not been served fingers. The food item’s label on the menu described a cooking style; it was not a guarantee.
The majority is a bit nebulous on the limits of the “boneless” cooking style, but if you’re thinking that one of its hallmarks would be, at a minimum, a lack of bones, you would apparently be wrong in Ohio. Astoundingly, a few pages before this passage, the majority notes that the cook’s deposition testimony “explained that the boneless wings were made from pre-butterflied, boneless, skinless chicken breasts,” an odd description to include for raw chicken meat when you’re defining “boneless” as a cooking style and not a straightforward description of the boniness of meat.
The whole point of this “style” argument is to claim that the plain meaning of “boneless wing” is not that it’s boneless but that it’s made with breast meat. As though diners ordering boneless wings would be right to suspect they might be eating chunks of bone-in breast. That’s why the opinion invokes the humble chicken finger as another anatomically incorrect product. Ad bullsh.t ad astra (“to the stars“).
But kudos to defense counsel. Someone over there said,
“What if we contend that the word ‘boneless’ means ‘bones?’” And rather than say, “It might undermine our credibility with the court to sound like we’re f_cking idiots,” the partner thought, “Hey, you miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take!”
In dissent, the three Democratic justices deployed a far less tenuous grasp of the English language.
The majority opinion states that “it is common sense that [the label ‘boneless wing’] was merely a description of the cooking style.” Majority opinion at ¶ 23. Jabberwocky. There is, of course, no authority for this assertion, because no sensible person has ever written such a thing.
And sensible people still have not.
You can read the rest of the article here: ‘Boneless’ Wings Can Have Bones, Declare Committed Textualists
Where was Justice Clarence Thomas during all of this nonsensical exchange?