I went to the mail box the other day and found what at first glance appeared to be a pleasant surprise. It was a missive telling me I was a beneficiary of a class action suit I had no idea was even in the works. An insurance company with which I’ve had a life policy for about 30 years seems to have stiffed many of its policy holders on some dividends and a court was about to approve a settlement in the case.

The first thing that flashed into my mind was that card you find in a Monopoly game: ‘Bank error in your favor. Collect $50.’ This being an example of American civil jurisprudence, however, I probably won’t end up getting anywhere near that much.

Here’s some numbers I managed to glean from the convoluted document in my mail. The settlement involves $18 million the insurer is to pay 515,000 of its policy holders. This would seem to work out to about $34 a head.

But wait. There are some legal fees to be extracted from this sum first. And yes, administration fees, too. So policy holders such as myself are guaranteed just $5 each, though some may get more when the whole thing is adjudicated and administered. $6.98? 11.24? I can hardly wait to find out.

With piddling amounts for barely victimized victims such as myself, what was the point of this class action? Was it designed to reintroduce us to Charles Dickens? To find why Mr. Bumble said “the law is an ass” in Oliver Twist? To ponder over the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in “Bleak House?” Surely, the decades long twaddle this class action fandango wasn’t an attempt to make whole abused policy holders to the tune of $5 apiece. Or $6.98. Or $11.24? Or lordly, even a whopping $34!

Maybe, in fact, it was just an effort to remind us how badly this country needs court reform. And please, please, please, don’t post a comment telling me how necessary is the lawyering that gets people badly injured by medical malpractice proper financial redress. I’m not talking about that kind of reform. This present case is nothing of the sort. I’m talking reforming the kind of case that doesn’t aid victims who probably weren’t victimized all that much in the first place, enriches no one but attorneys and court flunkies, and clogs the legal system to no good purpose.

In an era when dysfunctional government is so much on display, it’s easy to forget about other forms of destructive idiocy in the public realm. Like what see on display in our courts — all the way up to the very highest one.