But you’re the only one who brought up McDonald’s coffee.
How about Honda of America Mfg., Inc. v. Norman, 104 S.W.3d 600 (Tex. App. 2003)?
Karen Norman drowned in her Honda Civic after she backed into the bay and couldn’t release her seatbelt. At trial, the jury found her 25% contribulatorily negligent. They awarded damages to her parents.
Her “negligence” was that she was pig drunk. BAC was .17, over twice the legal limit.
Fortunately, the appeals court reversed the judgement.
But Honda did not recover the substantial costs of defending themselves.
The jury knew, of course, that Honda was not really to blame. But they figured that Honda was a big company and wouldn’t miss $48 million. The second jury, anyway: the first hung.
Those types of suits are bad. But Google “Prenda Law,” for something much worse.
It is true that both sides have stupid people in their ranks. However, the GOP is currently (not always) advocating stupid policy decisions.
Also, how much do you think tort reform would save? You would agree, I think, that saving a small sum might not be wise, if the result is that you end up with a max of $250k when the hospital amputates the wrong leg?
I think you’d have to assemble a test panel of subjects with BAC of 0.17 and see which seat belts they can and can’t open. It might have been that the seat belt was harder to open than most, making the lawsuit reasonable.
If the lawsuit was frivolous, the system works. Those bringing the suits have to eat their legal costs. Lawyers who bring baseless suits lose more money (if they are the “pay only if you win” types) than those that don’t.
Can I ask, what if Honda had a seat belt design that for whatever reason was negligent?
Would “tort reform” in this sense keep you from even filing the lawsuit? Wouldn’t it have to go to trial? Would it mean that the person who brought the lawsuit would have to pay the court costs if they don’t win?
If that’s the case, wouldn’t the system have a chilling effect on people with legitimate claims?
I honestly don’t know, I’m not slinking for a gotcha or anything.
no, clearly they don’t. If we can bring up ANY examples like this, that are THAT stupid, then clearly the courts aren’t doing their jobs. Unless you think the jobs of courts is to steal money from “rich corporations” to any stupid ass who complains, because jurors are stupid and sympathetic to crybabies and think the companies and the economy have endless money.
In that sense, any system slanted one way or another or even perfectly fair, is going to have a chilling effect.
As it stands now, tort is extremely overboard. Companies are responsible for anything and everything that ever happens that has anything remotely to do with their activities, and people get rewards that don’t take into account that at a certain point, you’re just injured and you won’t be the same again and there is no way to make you whole and your income will never be the same again anyway, so why calculate based on the earlier income?, and so being that much more punitive doesn’t help anyone. One may as well advocate torture as punishment for crimes because “it’s just that much more of a disincentive.” At a certain point, you just have to stop, there has to be a limit.
There are serious issues with the way the court system. For one thing, judges being gotten from people who were practicing lawyers, and after their career having the ability to go back into practicing law. Of course they’re always going to rule in favor of damages, lawyers often get paid on contingency, and if they lose, they don’t have to pay the other side’s costs. And the jury system is a joke: a jury of people who were too stupid to think up an excuse to get out of jury duty.
There are numerous solutions varying intensities, from loser pays, to loser pays only when the plaintiff takes the case on contingency (or the other way around, when he DOESN’T pay his lawyer on contingency).
But in general, the rulings really are fucking nuts. I remember Volokh writing about a ruling, where a guy sued because he got hurt because the chair at his lawyers office (he was there dealing with a different lawsuit) broke and he fell. The appellate judge ruled in favor of the guy, writing in so much legalese that it is reasonable to expect that law offices be responsible for their chairs. But based on the legal theory, it in practice means that every office everywhere would have to perform chair inspections on a regular basis. That shit’s clearly overboard: sometimes things just happen and it’s no one’s fault
Indeed, those numbers supporting it are in the same levels as AGW.
BTW the points I made stand as I said that there is evidence that Nuclear and free trade are beneficial, and are followed by Democrats; however, there is very little to go for tort reform.
Surprisingly I do agree, the condition though is that there should be already a way to offer affordable health care access to all. When that is not here then we get the irrational system that we see.
And I SHOULD be dating beyonce knowles, and have a solid gold toilet. Somehow, these things are impossible though.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that there is always a way of making sure that not a single person ever gets fucked over. Some things just aren’t affordable. I know you’ve been told other countries have national healthcare systems, and they work just fine, but that’s a lie. In the first place, those countries are even more fiscally in the hole than we are, and we’re already basically doomed to eventual bankruptcy. Secondly, they either trade low prices for massive failures of their health systems in the form of huge wait times which Americans would never accept, or the country pays for SOME medical expenses. France’s is the latter and the best system, but note that they have virtually no medical malpractice tort (comparatively), and a much more free-market system (yup, it’s subsidized, but beyond that it’s way freer than America’s mixed system). Singapore requires that people save their money, and again, they also have an actual free market system.
Anyway, that’s all OT. That life isn’t perfect, that fundamentally some people are going to get fucked over and there is nothing anyone can do about it, is not an excuse for a massively corrupt judicial system with looney toons rulings that only benefit the lawyer/judge cartel.
Because that’s how the system works. The alternative, which you might prefer, would be for people who suffer harm due to negligence not being able to sue corporations.
I will readily agree that, yes, life is not fair, and yes, some people will get fucked over. I do find it interesting that you always seem content put the ‘fucked over’ on the person that was actually injured, rather than the person that created the condition that injured them.
I would posit that this is because you can easily see yourself as the person doing the fucking, and less so being the person fucked. Which is not an uncommon phenomenon, I have found, and brings us back to my issue with much of modern Republican philosophy.
When someone gets hurt, costs exist. The only thing we are arguing is where those costs should be apportioned. In virtually every case I have seen (and of course, in a system of thousands upon thousands of suits, SOME will be bad law, no argument there), the judgment of the case is consistent with the facts presented, even if I disagree. Too many take what they see on the nightly news and think that it is the sum total of the facts presented, which is about as incorrect as you can be.
Now, do we want to discuss excessive punitive awards? That is a less charged argument, and I suspect we can find middle ground there. However, the idea of billion dollar businesses being forced to pay out million dollar verdicts as a result of bad actions does not cause me to lose any sleep. What other disincentive to bad behavior do you recommend?
Yes, but it seems like people want tort reform to make sure that no corporation ever gets fucked over. If a collapsing chair is the risk a person takes when he chooses to interact with the world, then is an unjustified civil action the risk a company takes when it chooses to go into business? Why should we say “tough luck, things happen” to the individual and “we must reform the system” to the corporation?
True: heart transplants can’t be provided for everyone.
The systems in a lot of other countries work better than our system works. Whether or not that’s “just fine” is a matter of opinion, but they do a better job of managing health care than we do.
We could learn a lot from Canada and Australia, if we’d be willing to learn.
I know you’ve been told that Canada’s and Australia’s healthcare systems don’t work very well, but that’s incorrect.
(Can we back away from the “it’s a lie” talk? There are lots of ways to be wrong without being liars.)
A sucker’s born every minute. But of course, every community has a cottage industry. They don’t think they’re suckers. They buy what they like. The conservatives you deride think you’re the sucker trapped in your own mediatainment bubble. The UFO enthusiast laughs at both, the stupid sheeple. Somewhere, a hipster buys a Vote Ron Paul t-shirt. So it goes.
You’re speaking like we’re all omnipotent gods. Maybe the “cost” isn’t as high because the person just can’t afford the medical bills, and just dies, or goes on without ongoing treatment. You’re starting with the assumption that we can save everyone and then calculating these costs, which again, you have separated from the concept responsibility and reality itself, based on that full medical care.
Sometimes people get hurt. That’s it. Being alive, simply being alive in the world, can injure, through no one’s fault. You get hurt, they take you to the hospital, fix you, but you have chronic problems. You can’t afford physical therapy, and now can’t work, so can’t pay your bills. Maybe you end up homeless and slowly die. I know this sounds terrible, and it is, but that doesn’t mean that the economy actually has the money in the very long run to prevent these problems Again, we’re pretty much headed for bankruptcy already.
The best we can do is mandate that worker’s comp insurance, which we already do, in some states, I believe. But part of any real philosophy will have to accept that you can’t fix everything and prevent every bad thing from happening.
No, not really. That’s just crappy armchair philosophy, and I’m betting you have little to no of either personal experience to back this nor examples from media/writings.
I’m a realist, that’s it. And I work from the values of human freedom in the not-bring-fucked-with sense, with a much less important but still important let’s-try-not-to-let-anyone-get-too-fucked social safety net policy, kept in check with FISCAL REALITY.
You’re kidding yourself if you think no small businesses have ever been bankrupted by this. The awards are just as grandiose as when the big businesses are the “perpetrators”.
ehhhh… Yeah, except that there are now a bunch of really stupid precedents that they work from. Plus, more and more as they investigate they find the big-money litigationists were just bribing jurors.
I’ve read people regularly die waiting for care, which is unconscionable when you force people to pay for care beforehand.
Nick Gillespie on reason magazine wrote an article about How France’s healthcare system (his wife is French) is way better, and way cheaper for what it does, because it’s PARTLY subsidized, LOW TORT, and VERY free market. Any student of economics know that any such welfare system would have to have those elements, combined with cut offs for qualifying for high incomes.
Our mixed system is NOT more “free market” in any sense: all the incentives are powerful and perverse. We would need more of what France has, particularly, ending the health care as income exception, and ending the weird medicare and Medicaid systems that help jack up prices by their weird fucked up mixed pricing system (seriously, when you read it, it’s like it’s DESIGNED to jack up prices), along with the same tort reform, and also mandates on municipalities’ powers to regulate medical buildings. Medical spaces are severely limitd for no reason.
Uhhh… what?
This is what tort reformists are saying, something so ludicrous shouldn’t even make it into court! Immediate summary judgement, or whatever similar mechanisms. I’ll grant you can’t remove the basic lawyers cost for dealing with a complaint, which can add up to $1000, but really stupid shit should be stopped short.
Clearly, chairs are gonna break and they will hurt people. That’s life. It’s totally unreasonable to expect ANYONE WHO HAS ANY KIND OF OFFICE OF ANY SIZE EVER to perform chair inspections, whatever the hell that would be.
