If You Can Sue Your Neighbors Over Cigarettes, You Can Sue Them Over Anything
A lawsuit between neighbors on Capitol Hill could set a very loose precedent for homeowners? rights, a libertarian scholar says.
March 11, 2015
By Benjamin Freed
The District?s homeowners can look forward to a bright future of suing one another over the slightest bugaboos in the wake of a case between Capitol Hill neighbors in which one family successfully obtained a court order preventing their neighbor from lighting up a cigarette or a joint in his own home, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute.
DC has been gripped this week by the suit filed by lawyers Brendan and Nessa Coppinger, who claim that their neighbor, Edwin Gray, is harming them and their children with cigarette smoke that seeps between their Fifth Street, Northeast, rowhouses. The Coppingers, according to the Post, moved into their place last September; Gray?s family has been in their house for half a century. But when conversations about the smoking failed, the Coppingers sued Gray in DC Superior Court for $500,000 in damages. The case became news last week when a judge issued a temporary order prohibiting Gray and his family from smoking anything.
Tobacco is unquestionably harmful, but Olson says the feud between the Coppingers and Gray suggests a tipping point in cases involving homeowners? rights.
“There are good reasons why until very recently in legal history it would have been unthinkable for courts to intervene in most neighbor-smoking situations,” Olson tellsWashingtonian via email. “Courts always applied a de minimis standard to nuisance and similar claims.”
In other words, judges tended to dismiss lawsuits filed over cooking smells, dog barks, a few minutes of loud music, or the tantrums of noisy children.
“If you claimed actual harm and thus damages, you had to prove actual harm,” Olson writes. “Mere fear, or statistics based on a one-molecule-might-kill-you theory, wasn?t good enough.”
Cigarette smoke, though, has exceeded its fellow neighborhood scourges. Olson argues the social crusade against tobacco is so uniquely “disapproving and inflexible” that society has implemented a much lower burden of legal proof.
“I don?t think this is the first such ruling, nor will it be the last,” he writes.
But if a person can sue a neighbor over the scent of smoldering tobacco, Olsen suggests there?s nothing holding up lawsuits filed over the use of any item that emits smoke. Fireplaces and grills, for instance, both give off carcinogenic fumes, often in greater volume than cigarette smoke that creeps between under-insulated walls or under a door. The precedent established by the Coppingers? case could even bleed into DC?s new permission of in-home marijuana consumption.
“It does make you wonder why conservative opponents of marijuana would bother to fight legalization in DC when instead they can let it go through and get rich suing over it,” Olson says.
This is not to say the District?s judicial system will suddenly grind to a halt under a barrage of lawsuits filed over common household objects that involve open flames. But could neighbors start suing each other over smoldering fireplaces or charbroiled meats?
“If courts behaved logically!” Olson writes. “Which, as you know, is a very big if.”
“We were floored,” Judge bans man from smoking inside his own home
MARCH 10, 2015
BY KFOR-TV & K. QUERRY AND CNN WIRE
WASHINGTON (WJLA) ? Under Washington D.C.’s new law, anyone can smoke marijuana inside their home.
Well, almost anyone.
A temporary decision by a Superior Court judge means one man in the district can’t smoke anything in his home, including pot and cigarettes.
Edwin Gray says he turns to a cigarette to relax.
Now, he has to go outside if he wants to light up.
“You want me to stop what I’ve been doing in my house, all my life?” Gray told WJLA.
A temporary order of the court means he can’t smoke inside a home that has been owned by his family for 50 years.
“We were floored,” said Mozella Johnson, Gray’s sister.
Johnson says she was shocked that a lawsuit filed by neighbors who moved in last year could now dictate what the family can do inside its home.
Court records show that the couple who moved in next door claim they’re being harmed by smoke they say leaks into their home through a hole in the basement.
“I think it’s an excellent precedent to start, so people can realize you can’t just ignore your neighbor,” said Benny Kass, a real estate attorney and Washington Post columnist. “Your home is no longer your castle.”
In response to the suit, a judge ruled that the family cannot smoke cigarettes, cigars or marijuana inside the home.
“I think this is going to open the door to a lot of thinking, a lot of cases,” Kass said. “I gotta believe once this comes out, there’s going to be 100 cases filed in Superior Court tomorrow.”
In addition to the injunction, their lawsuit asks for $500,000 in damages.
