Smoking-caused apartment fires have been responsible for not only many of their neighbor renters’ personal effects losses, but their very deaths as well, in all too many instances — and obviously, tragically, no lawsuit can bring someone back from the dead.
By the way, if I were the smoking tenants’ defense lawyer, I’d argue in court that since the owner has the perfect, legal right not to rent to smokers in the first place (smokers have been legally ruled to not — repeat, not — be a specially protected class of persons), his willful, optional choice to rent to smokers removes such smokers’ liability to “make the owner whole” financially, as a consequence.
Now on the other hand, any harmed nonsmokers (if burned to death, then their relatives, et al.) might well make a viable court case for sky-high dollar amounts of compensation from both the smoker(s) and the building owner as well.
