For all the talk about "activist judges" over the past couple years, this story may take the cake: a judge suing a dry cleaner over a single pair of missing trousers for $65,000,000.

Guy walks into a dry cleaner. Dry cleaner misplaces his suit pants. When the customer, administrative hearings judge Roy Pearson, hears that the pants are missing, he asks to be reimbursed for the full price of the suit. Not an unreasonable request since a suit jacket without matching slacks doesn't do anyone any good. 

Evidently, the pants were found a week later, but Judge Pearson decided to sue. Okay. At that point, the dry cleaners offered three different settlement offers of $3,000, $4,600, and finally $12,000! But the judge refused to settle and did what any litigious American would do...extrapolate!

Since he couldn't frequent his local dry cleaner, he asked for $15,000 -- the cost of renting a car every weekend for 10 years to go to another dry cleaner. As if that wasn't enough, he chose a strict interpretation of D.C.'s consumer protection law, which fines violators $1,500 per violation, per day. He counts 12 violations for 1,2000 days and multiplies that by the three owners to come to damages totaling $65 MILLION.

You can read the full story here. If you'd like to contribute to the cleaner's defense fund, you can do so here.