ABSTRACT
Sometimes individuals who are injured file lawsuits in which they claim that they experienced greater trauma than the ordinary plaintiff because of their cultural or religious background. As a consequence, they contend in civil litigation that they ought to be entitled to larger damage awards. In one case, for example, after Gypsies in Spokane, Washington, were subjected to an illegal police search that rendered young Roma girls unmarriageable, they filed a civil rights lawsuit in which they sought forty million dollars.1 As there was no question about liability because the city admitted that the search was illegal, the sole issue on appeal was the size of the damage award.2 While anyone subject to an illegal police search can seek monetary damages, the claim here is that the impact of the misconduct was more devastating to the plaintiffs than it would have been to non-Gypsies. In short, the injury was ostensibly more severe because of their belief that the girls, touched beneath the waist by the police, were marime or polluted and hence incapable of ever marrying.3 This type of argument is part of a larger trend in the legal system of individuals making claims based on cross-cultural differences (Levinson and Peng 2004).
