What the hell does some college kids frat code have to do with anything? And the average American will not observe the trial. It would be long and boring and not covered in any meaningful way by the press. No dead baby= no Nancy Grace.
And here I thought she was only interested in dead pretty white women.
In other words, you have no idea. Attorneys don’t have a duty to explain their decisions to you, only to their clients.
Do you think statistical averages are the sole factor? There is the all important factor of whether this offer of payment right now is more valuable than a potential judgment of an unknown amount at some undetermined but several-years-in-the-future date.
First of all, that is not the duty of civil litigants. Second, civil litigants do not have the standing to ask for it. Third, a civil court does not have the authority to demand it. Fourth, there is no guarantee that any kind of “full ignominy” will (1) be exposed (2) will result in any policy decision to cut off BP. GE and Boeing are two of the most corrupt corporations on the planet and they have managed to maintain their relationships with the Department of Defense.
How is this at all relevant to either the American public or to BP?
That’s not for you to say. That’s for the plaintiffs to determine. If you’re so hot to pursue this, then sue them yourself.
Hey, I made it through the entire Paterno thread* without googling Nancy Grace, and I’m not going to start now. Just stop mentioning her, so I’m not tempted!
*If that goes down in history as the Biggest CF Ever, I think we should get patches that commemorate it. (“I survived Sandusky, Paterno and SA!”)
Or maybe we just call it The Paper Towel Roll Merit Badge.
Ok admittedly she has a slightly larger repertoire than I gave her credit for. But it doesn’t include oily birds.
…and he’s still retarded.
SA gets that with The Kiddie-Diddler Dongle.
Exactly! Has the Gulf of Mexico had a chance to hire a lawyer? Or the egrets, or the herons, or the many little tiny fishies yearning to breathe free?
Or the otters? Will no one think of the OTTERS? Without otters, there is no reason to exist,
Oh my science…
I know what the otters would say. They would say we shouldn’t take this any more. They would say that we gotta take these bastards. Now we could do it with conventional weapons, but that could take years and cost millions of lives. No, I think we have to go all out. I think that this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody’s part!
Yes, they will choose to… EVOLVE! And charge up onto the land and kill every human they encounter.
We should put them on double secret probation to prevent that from happening.
Shit, now that I think about it, maybe the otters run BP
You sure as hell posted ranty threads about how you hated 60,000,000 people based on the fact that at one time, years ago, the “B” in “BP” once stood for “British”, despite it mainly being an American company these days.
But we all laughed at you then. Don’t make us do it again.
Hey, cut that out! Gonz was frequently on the right side of an issue, even if sometimes for the wrong reasons. And he had some decent cites. No fair comparing him to Shodan. Plus he isn’t here to defend himself…
Anyway, there is an awful lot of emphasis placed on the ‘mutual agreement’ aspect of the settlement. I believe this is to imply an agreement between co-equal participants, which suggests the thing is legal if not fair. But clearly the participants are not equal.
One is a multi-billion dollar oil corporation. The other is a mostly divided group of individuals who happen to have one thing in common: they were impacted by the worst accidental man-made environmental disaster in history.
The 2001 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded for work on the behavior of asymmetrical markets:
It is repeated again and again how the settlement is a better deal than the results of a trial; in the same breath as a trial is declared a crapshoot! I have seen estimates for the class-action portion to theoretically reach as high as $200 billion. Admittedly that is on the edge of the probability bell-curve, but it might happen.
A full trial would ‘signal’ a description of BP’s full ignominy to the American people in general, the judge/jury in particular. The DoD could be persuaded in that atmosphere to take steps, let alone the judge. The world would be improved if it could be proved that an ignominious oil company could be taught a lesson. The money-sucking vacuum-voids beating in the corporate-person breasts of it’s peers would be forced to adapt some simulacrum of honor, respect and responsibility, lest they share the same fate.
Pretending not to notice some things is characteristic of ‘the system’.
You don’t think shelling out $100 billion (or whatever) in settlement might “teach an ignominious oil company a lesson”?
Hot off the presses! BP settles suit.
I am going to reserve judgement until I learn what the otters get out of it.
This isn’t a situation of asymmetric markets; this is shooting fish in a barrel. It just happens that the fish has enough money to pay the plaintiffs’ lawyers not to shoot. (and your calculus completely ignores the skill of the plaintiffs’ attorneys and the significant advantages they have at trial.)
You seem to believe that settling plaintiffs will get too little. BP pays a huge premium to avoid trial.
I still don’t know what DoD has to do with this, but BP’s safety history is trivially easy to find. The Gulf is just the latest chapter.
I dunno. I think buying out without a trial evades a formal examination of BP’s actions. You don’t want to take me for it, and ‘the system’ isn’t prepared to take themselves for it, so where is the reliable record? Yah perhaps it will take place in another context, but not in reference to these plaintiffs. I don’t like it but IANAL so I bet the precise issue evades me…
Because that is worth a lot. I suppose a lot of the additional value is to ‘society’ in general, which isn’t formally a plaintiff in this case. Too late now though, it is settled.
Replacing BP as the DoD’s bff would create serious long-term considerations in the oil world. I think it would signal high displeasure with extraordinary environmental disasters, but who knows, maybe the local experts can suggest a better solution.
GE etc have been identified as equally if not more corrupt that BP, as if to suggest that we can’t do much without these guys. So, what are we to do to reduce corruption? We can’t simply let it continue. How many disasters of Biblical proportions can we honestly withstand?
There may be criminal cases as well. The point of the civil case is to make the plaintiffs whole. This is the best deal they think they could get and the system worked.