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Scarring and Disfigurement Lawsuits - Damages
Would a business be likely to trust multi-million dollar business negotiations, perhaps involving international travel, to a facial burn victim? Or would the company be concerned that the scarring would make the client easily distracted and uncomfortable, anticipating the client’s bias, thus ruining the business deal? Industrial products containing inherent dangers are used almost exclusively in today’s homes, and scarring and disfigurement can easily occur from chemical, mechanical, and heat abrasions and burns.
Scarring and disfigurement can result in 2 kinds of damages: special and general. Special damages cover calculable economic losses, such as lost wages, lost future earning capacity, career diminishment, and medical expenses. These are actual losses that a scarring victim can suffer, because of the bias that exists out in the “real world” against disfigured people.
In addition to ruining job possibilities, disfigurement can ruin social lives, marriage possibilities, and friendships, resulting in lifelong emotional pain. Scarring and disfigurement can cause a loss in the quality of life, can decrease self-esteem, result in psychological damage, and may prevent a person from enjoying sports, recreational activities, and even the simplest of daily errands.
This second category of noncalculable emotional damages is called general damages. General damages include emotional distress, pain and suffering, loss of the companionship of a family member or loved one, loss of consortium, and more. This is the time when a jury can use their emotions to judge the emotional worth of the plaintiff’s suffering – no legal principle can prescribe exactly what emotional suffering is worth.
Punitive damages that punish the defendant can also be awarded where, for instance, a product was designed so dangerously, that the manufacturer basically knew it would cause someone to be scarred and disfigured. For example, a poorly-designed vaporizer poured boiling water onto a child when it was knocked over.
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