It was the summer of '94. I played baseball almost every day on the field next to my apartment in the shadow of Romney Stadium. When I wasn't playing baseball, I was riding my bike or playing with Jurassic park action figures in the swamp under the willow with friends (and picking the leeches off later). One thing that I will never forget from that summer was being grounded for about a month for making a big mistake. That mistake just happens to be my first intentional tort.
Tort law is a tradition that we Americans brought with us from our cousins across the pond. A tort in its most basic form is a civil wrong. It comes from a french word that means "twisted." There are six intentional torts. The ones you have probably heard of are battery, assault, and trespass. One that you may have heard in passing is conversion to chattels--that's the one that I committed.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, there are some things in law that fit with common sense. Conversion is one of those. The idea is that if someone takes something that is yours and disposes of it as she pleases, she is liable to the true owner for the market value of that thing. The principle is probably best explained through my tortious past.
Our little apartment complex was occupied by young families going to school so there were alot of kids running around all the time. Me and another friend LOVED to jump off of swings. It was the bomb. Our little playground had a swingset with two swings, a slide, and a little teeter-totter (which seem to have disappeared from playgrounds--maybe from torts suits...). There was a fence to keep kids away (unsuccessfully I might add) from the canal on the other side. On a warm summer day just after a PB&H lunch, I went out with my buddy to swing jump. Attention spans being as they are at that age, we probably played on the swings for about twenty minutes before the object of our conversion caught my eye.
After a particularly high jump, I rolled after landing and while brushing sand from my stomach, I saw a bit of pinkish something poking out of the sand. As it took shape in my mind, I recognized the leg of my sister's favorite plaything: a Barbie doll (see heart). Let me just say that there is something innately boyish about hating dolls, especially barbies. As I pulled the doll out of the sand, that burning desire to destroy it grew within me. I held it up to my friend who promptly left his swing to look at my find.
There was no discussion about what was to be done with it. We were boys. Boys that played baseball everyday and did cub scouts. Boys that hated taking showers. Boys that needed to break things. With my eight year old senses, I had a sneaking suspicion that what we were about to do with this object of girly attention was wrong, but my friend and my boyish tendencies unfortunately won out. In all fairness, we looked around to see if anyone had left it. Nobody had been to the park in a while (which for us was a half hour). The doll looked pretty banged up and was clearly buried on purpose.
What did matter is that we popped off all the arms and legs and then (logically) spun the remaining doll by its platinum-blond hair and took turns spinning it and then throwing it in the air. After we had thrown it against the slide a few times and thrown at high as possible, we realized that there wasn't much else to do with it. As we had no access to fire or a high enough power magnifying glass to do any real damage, we tossed gave the barbie doll one last spin and hucked it over the fence (see lightning bolt).
I got caught. Apparently some little girl (see orange star) was bawling and her older brothers told on me. Her oldest brother happened to be my nemesis (we later had two fights- in one he threw a baseball bat at me and the other turned out more in my favor). the girl's parents talked to my parents and they worked out justice. They claimed that it was some kind of special edition barbie and my parents ended up giving them twenty bucks for it. I ended up having to work it off. It didn't make sense then, but it does now.
By destroying something that wasn't mine, even though we assumed that park toys are fair game, I converted her chattel (personal property) by treating it as if it were my own. She was able to recover thanks to the parental justice system and I think my parents helped me understand that tortious behavior doesn't really pay off. And that is the story of my first tort.
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