The Order of Operations
Michael Berkheimer was eating at Wings on Brookwood in Hamilton, Ohio, when a piece of chicken advertised as a boneless wing went down badly. Three days later, according to the Associated Press, he went to an emergency room with fever and an inability to keep food down. A doctor found a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.
Berkheimer sued the restaurant, supplier and farm, arguing that a customer ordering boneless wings should not need a warning that the dish might contain a bone. The Ohio Supreme Court rejected the claim in a 4-3 ruling, siding with lower courts that had dismissed the case.
Boneless: Now With Optional Bones
Justice Joseph T. Deters wrote for the majority that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, not a guarantee that no bone will ever appear. The opinion said a diner should be on guard because chickens have bones. It also compared the phrase to “chicken fingers,” observing that nobody expects an entrée to arrive with actual fingers.
That comparison is doing an impressive amount of work. Chicken fingers are a familiar nickname. “Boneless” is a plain English warning label that, in most settings, means the hard, sharp skeleton parts have been removed. The court’s logic effectively makes the adjective a motivational poster: strive for bonelessness, but manage your expectations.
The Dissent Has Notes
The dissenting justices called the majority’s reasoning “utter jabberwocky” and said a jury should have been allowed to decide whether the restaurant was negligent. That is a remarkably direct way for a judicial opinion to say, “Have you people ever ordered lunch?”
The ruling does not mean every restaurant is free to serve a chicken skeleton under any name. It means this particular negligence claim could not proceed under Ohio law as interpreted by the majority. Berkheimer’s injury was real; the court’s question was whether the restaurant had a legal duty to warn about a risk it considered common knowledge.
The Bottom Line
There are two lessons here. First, chew carefully, especially when a menu uses a word that sounds more definite than the law considers it. Second, the Ohio Supreme Court has now joined the long national project of making ordinary language less useful. Somewhere, “boneless” is filing an appeal against “unlimited,” “fresh” and “all-you-can-eat.”
Sources
Associated Press: Chicken wings advertised as ‘boneless’ can have bones, Ohio Supreme Court decides