The case SHOULD get thrown out of court in the preliminary hearing - but what SHOULD happen and what WILL happen are not necessarily the same thing. TONS of lawsuits are allowed to move forward that failed to establish a causal link - silicone implants to name one and lots of other diseases and syndromes fall into this category. When it comes to medical issues in particular, judges and juries are too easily swayed by junk science and too easily dismiss claims by the plaintiff that the causal links do not exist or have not been adequately established. Even with the tobacco lawsuits, the plaintiffs didn't have to establish a firm causal link between smoking and THEIR lung cancer and other problems. It's pretty hard to establish that a causal link exists in a particular case when you figure that 90% of smokers do NOT get lung cancer and that about 25% of people that DO get lung cancer never smoked. So to get around that problem they start touting the concept of "second-hand smoke" trying to plant the notion that all lung cancer is caused directly or indirectly by smoking. I'll never forget the ads that proclaimed loudly and repeatedly that the smoke that nonsmokers breath contains many times as much tar and nicotine as what the smoker inhales. Gee, so somehow all of this tar and nicotine laden smoke leaves the end of the cigaratte less than four inches away from the smoker's nose and then travels several feet BEFORE concentrating at the OTHER person's nose!

And lots of rulings have the effect of regulating the commerce of products that are not considered illegal - though admittedly it depends on what is considered "effect of regulating". The tobacco settlements imposed lots of conditions on the advertising methods for a legal product. The frivolous lawsuits that plagued civil aviation in the 70's and 80's drove most manufacturer's completely out of the small aircraft market. Only some of them have re-entered the market, after long overdue tort reform, but they have to charge airplanes for over $200,000 that used to sell for $50,000 and should, by all rights, sell for $20,000 or less. The cost for aircraft parts is ridiculous. A light aircraft battery (which is smaller than a car battery and has to deliver less current and have less capacity) costs over $250. A two-way radio that is no more complex than a $200 ham handheld costs a couple thousand dollars. Why? Because of the liability costs that the manufacturers have to cover. When Piper get sued - and loses - when a pilot disregards all regulations and taxis into a parked fuel truck in a 50 year old Cub and claims that it's Piper's fault because the airplane, like nearly all airplanes made back then, is a tail dragger and has limited forward visibility on the ground, something is very wrong - especially since it wasn't by any means an isolated occurance.

As for this lawsuit....will it get thrown out? Hopefully. It's true that most such assinine suits do. It's the ones that don't that are the problem. They create a situation whereby these lawyers (notice that I say "these" lawyers - and not "all" lawyers) treat it as a gambling strategy. They file suit after suit after suit knowing that most of them will get thrown out or that they will lose the ones that don't. But they keep their costs to a minimum and know and hope that they will just happen to file the magic lawsuit that, by all rights and expectations when they filed it, should have been thrown out but managed to slip through and either garners a huge out-of-court settlement or just happens to land in the lap of a reality-challenged jury.

The solution is to impose real costs on the lawyers that file these types of lawsuits - such as loser pays - to force them to consider - truly consider - the merits of their case instead of being willing to roll the dice and see what happens. If nothing else, they should be held to the same standards that they claim they are holding everyone else to. If you or I do something that, they claim, led to nebulous and ill defined injuries to their client such as "denying them the enjoyment of the view from their property" they claim that their clients have a right to monetary damages. Yet if their unfounded roll-of-the-dice lawsuit saddles me with so many legal expenses that I go out of business, they claim that they should be held immune to having to pay me damages because "that's just the way the legal system works". Have lawyers been penalized for outrageously frivolous lawsuits? Yes, it has happened. But it is the exception and not the rule and is infrequent enough that it poses no realistic concern for most of these types of lawyers.