I think that the cases are more about the lawyers than anything else. I've read about cases that seemed to defy common sense, but which were, apparently, well decided in terms of legal argument.

For instance, to play Devil's Advocate, what's to stop the girl from saying what she said about the mother had the mother simply spanked her or ordered her to get a haircut? Note that I'm not saying that they're the same thing, but when you're talking about the law, you're talking about precedent and jurisprudence.

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"Government big enough to supply everything you need is big enough to take everything you have... The course of history shows that as a government grows, liberty decreases."

-Thomas Jefferson