Boneless chicken wings may have bones, US court rules

By a 3 to 4 vote, the conservative-Republican justices of the Superior Court of Ohio in the United States declared that restaurant patrons should not consider boneless chicken wings (Boneless chicken wings), as on the menu, there are boneless chicken wings.

Three Liberal-Democrat ministers scoffed at the majority vote: courts should leave the judgment of facts like this to juries, because juries have common sense, which many judges do not.

As stated therein ConclusionMichel Berkheimer sued a restaurant, distributor and chicken manufacturer in negligence after eating a boneless chicken wing and swallowing the bone.

After two days of fever and difficulty breathing, he went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a bone cut in his esophagus, causing a bacterial infection. Surgery was done to remove it.

The High Court affirmed the judgments in favor of the defendants in the first and second cases. They held that the defendants could not be held liable for negligence even though a boneless chicken wing was said to contain the bone.

“There is no breach of duty of care when the consumer reasonably expects the presence of a harmful substance in food and protects himself from it. What the consumer must consider is whether the harmful substance is foreign or natural to the food,” the majority opinion said.

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According to the court, consumers can claim a restaurant’s negligence “if the food contains a foreign substance or the condition of the food is unsanitary.” Majority votes cited examples of “glass, stones, wire or nails in food” and “deteriorated, contaminated or infected meat or vegetables”.

Boneless

The defeated vote specifically criticized the majority’s statement that a “boneless wing” label on the menu is “an indication of cooking style and not a guarantee that a chicken wing is boneless.”

Often, “consumers should assume that boneless wings may not have been made from chicken wings, in the same way that they should assume that chicken legs were not delivered despite an order for chicken legs.”

For a minority, “this is pure nonsense”. People assume exactly what is written on the menu according to the meaning of the words in the dictionaries. For example, the Cambridge English Dictionary And the Collins Dictionary defines “Boneless“as”without bones” (without bones).

“The question is: Does anyone in this country believe that parents want to feed their children boneless wings or tender meat (Chicken tenders Or Chicken nuggets), do you expect the food to contain chicken bones? Of course not. As they read the Word’Boneless‘, they think it’s boneless, not that meat can’t have bones, as any sane person would.

A minority vote says the plaintiff should be given an opportunity to present his case to a jury. “The nation’s founders viewed the right to a jury trial in civil cases as an important bulwark against tyranny and corruption, a precious safeguard that could not be left to the discretion of a sovereign judiciary.”

“The majority decision makes a factual determination to ensure that a jury does not have the opportunity to use something that does not have a majority vote: common sense. The decision in this case puts another nail in the coffin of the nation’s jury,” the minority opinion said.