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Last year, Ohio’s Supreme Court attracted a fair amount of attention with a majority decision where the justices who issued the ruling essentially said people who order boneless wings shouldn’t actually expect them to be boneless. Now, a lawmaker in the state is challenging that logical conclusion with a proposed bill that would undermine the precedent that was set.
It’s been more than 20 years since Buffalo Wild Wings added a “boneless” offering to the menu, a popular but nonetheless controversial option among purists who have a tendency to (correctly) note they aren’t actually wings but glorified chicken nuggets using meat that’s typically source from the breast of the bird.
Those deep-fried chunks may be shunned by chicken wing traditionalists, but they’ve nonetheless managed to infiltrate menus at dining establishments across the United States—including a restaurant in Ohio that ended up at the center of a case that made it all the way to the state’s Supreme Court.
It sort of goes without saying boneless wings should not contain any bones, but a man named Michael Berkheimer encountered a piece of one that ended up getting lodged in his throat after he ordered some from a restaurant in the city of Hamilton in 2016.
Berkheimer needed multiple surgeries to address the damage stemming from that unexpected bone encounter, and he ultimately sued the eatery and their chicken suppliers while arguing anyone who orders boneless wings should end up getting a product that’s truly boneless.
However, the Republican judges that comprise the 4-3 majority on the Ohio Supreme Court ultimately disagreed when they dismissed the case last summer after issuing a ruling that stated “the consumer could have reasonably expected and guarded against the presence of the injurious substance in the food…the food item’s label on the menu described a cooking style; it was not a guarantee.”
According to NBC4i, Bill DeMora, a Democratic State Senator representing Columbus, disagreed with the ruling to the point where he’s decided to introduce SB 38—dubbed as the “boneless wing bill”—which is largely aimed at attempting to change the institutional process that led to the aforementioned ruling being issued in the first place.
DeMora’s primary gripe is that the case was decided via a summary judgment that prevented it from being conducted in front of a jury at every stage of the appeals process; the bill would require “civil food injury cases [to] go before a jury of one’s peers rather than be decided by a judge” (he noted juries are the “backbone and foundation of the judicial system” and that the legal process “should not have an individual judge determine whether a company is negligent or not”).
In a perfect world, there would be a federal law that requires boneless wings to meet that definition (and, in my opinion, also prevents them from being referred to as “wings” in the first place), but I guess you have to work with what you’ve got.
Content shared from brobible.com.