In his 49-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the World Trade Center property, “has not shown that it will prove its defense of governmental immunity as to negligence allegations made by WTC occupants.”
I don’t know if you are asking the title question seriously or rhetorically, but the serious answer is “no”. Our judicial system is organized to keep judges as far removed from electoral whims as possible.
This is the stuff taught in law 101. You can’t hold someone responsible for acts of terrorism (other than the terrorists) unless you have one whopping case of negligence.
It would be like me suing you for damages because your car crashed into my house after a robber shot you.
However, although i’m not a structural engineer, what i’ve read suggests that it is going a little too far to call the Trade Centers “defectively designed.” As some people have said about cars in the past, we could all be driving around in much safer cars if we were willing to pay for them.
As i said in another thread on the subject, even if we think that the lawsuit is bad, i don’t think we should be looking to blame the judge in this case–he is bound by legal questions of what is and is not a legitimate lawsuit. I’m sure that he didn’t allow it to go forward on some personal whim.
Minty’s analogy is correct but her logic is flawed (as it applies to law). You cannot be expected to design a car to resist attack by a terrorist striking your vehicle at 120 mph. You are not expected, by law, to design fullproof designs against everything.
You are right, a judge is supposed to rule on the legitimacy of lawsuits. That is the point of my thread. This is a total waste of tax payer money.
Did you learn, in “Law 101,” the distinction between summary judgement and a verdict after trial, and between questions of fact to be resolved by a jury and questions of law?
Your OP complains that the judge denied summary judgement because, inter alia, the Port Authority “has not shown that it will prove its defense of governmental immunity as to negligence allegations made by WTC occupants.”
The Port Authority was not claiming anything about their negligence under this theory. They were claiming that they were immune from suit because they were a governmental agency. The judge did not believe they showed that immunity.
Your answer doesn’t address the issue, unless you believe governmental immunity kicks in only upon terrorist actions.
The plaintiffs also allege one whopping case of negligence against the airlines. You think the airlines were not negligent, but this appears to be a question of fact, not one of law.
However, the towers were supposed to be designed so that a 747 would not bring them down. So, it would be more like designing a car to withstand the structural impact of a 120 mile an hour car crash, but forgetting to design it so it doesn’t explode afterwords.
Well, until you provide us with some proof that the judge made a legal error in allowing the lawsuit to proceed, you have failed to make your point.
As Bricker points out, and as your own linked article shows, the judge seems to have only ruled on whether the defendant should be immune from such a lawsuit, not whether the suit itself will be successful. He has simply ruled that the Port Authority’s claim of immunity from suit cannot be sustained; he has made no ruling whatsoever on whether the PA is liable in the case. Similarly, while he said that the simple fact that terrorists took over the plane does not remove the airlines or Boeing from possible negligence, he made no assertion that the airlines or Boeing were in fact negligent.
I don’t think minty’s analogy is flawed at all, because it was only meant to serve as an analogy in terms of bringing the lawsuit, not in terms of whether or not the lawsuit will be successful.
And, in case you weren’t aware, minty is a lawyer.
(b) I am a practicing attorney with experience in both products liability generally and automotive design defects in particular (on the defense side). I know whereof I speak on this subject.
The “terrorist” thing doesn’t enter into it even the tiniest little bit. From the p.o.v. of the manufacturer’s duty, it doesn’t matter whether its vehicle is intentionally struck by a terrorist or accidentally struck by a little old lady from Pasadena. The manufacturer’s duty is the same either way: To design a vehicle reasonably capable of protecting its occupants in a crash. Whether the proposed alternative design is should have been adopted is judged by a cost-benefit standard.
The plaintiffs here allege that the parties responsible for building the WTC had a duty to design buildings that were reasonably capable of protecting its occupants in the event that an airplane crashed into it. On its face, this claim seems plausible, given that the designers actually did attempt to design the towers to survive an aircraft strike, and given also that airplanes have crashed into skscrapers before (I’m thinking particularly of the B-17 collision with the Empire State Building around the time of WWII). What do you think they have those flashing red lights on top of buildings for anyway? Christmas decorations?
If the persons responsible for building the WTC had a duty to make the towers airplane-resistant, and people died because they failed to come up with a reasonable design in response to that duty, then they could indeed be liable under ordinary products liability laws. If that is the case, then Congress–not some trial court judge in New York–is the proper authority to decide that the WTC folks should be immune from lawsuits arising out of the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
The judge did rule on the legitimacy of the suit. He decided it was a legitimate claim, at least insofar as the Port Authority was not immune from lawsuit. I’ve seen nothing from you that shows the judge was incorrect.
Not to nit pick but the 747 did not exist when the towers were designed. They were designed to withstand a 707 going at or less than 250 mph (the speed limit around airports). It was not designed to hold up to a wide body full of fuel traveling in excess of it’s structural rating. There certainly wouldn’t have been any data to predict various impacts and their fuel loads. You couldn’t do that today. There are too many variables to predict the outcome.
As for the the Empire State building, it was hit by a B-24 which is a toy in comparison to a wide body.
Obviously, Magiver totally fails to understand the legal issue involved, despite quite cogent analysis of the situation by both Bricker and minty green.
To summarize for our less than astute poster:
The judge determined that the Port Authority is not immune from suits such as the negligence action in question. In short, you can sue the Port Authority for negligence.
The Port Authority may be negligent by failing to design and build a tower that withstands impact by aircraft. It is not inherently unreasonable to consider the builder to have this duty.
What will actually happen if/when the matter is tried is a different issue.
PS: While federal judges cannot be “recalled” (because they aren’t voted into office in the first place), they can be impeached by Congress. In several states, judges can be recalled, because they either get voted into the position or have to face voter confirmation of their appointment. California is one such state.
Finally, I suggest that Magiver might want to actually take some “Law 101” courses (presumably Torts for starters) before he/she discourses about the law and what everyone knows from taking such courses. This board abounds in lawyers…
The judge ruled on the narrowest part of the trial and ignored everything else. Ruling on whether Gov’t immunity exists is only part of the greater picture. The case has no merit and the judge should rule in the broader sense before vast sums of taxpayer money is lost. For the life of me I don’t even know why such a defense was proposed.
The judge ruled on the motion that was submitted to the court. He can do no more at this time, contrary to your ill-informed complaining.
This is silly beyond measure. A 70-mph crash and rollover isn’t “normal use” for a motor vehicle, but it is certainly foreseeable and is something that a car design must take reasonable steps to account for. Similarly, it is eminently foreseeable that the world’s tallest building might be struck by an aircraft. Indeed, the designers of the WTC expressly acknowledged that fact and accounted for it in their designs. The question now is whether that accommodation was reasonable given the costs of an improved design and the magnitude of the risk.
Personally, I am reasonably symapthetic to the argument that they should have planned for a crash at greater than landing speeds, and that they should have accounted for a full fuel load. But those are questions for a jury, not me or you or the judge, to decide.
And I could pound some sense into your head with a brick, but I doubt you could get any money from Acme Brick Co. Apart from that, let’s not go into the threats of violence against our fellow posters, shall we?
Fortunately, that’s not the question posed by the plaintiffs, who are asking whether the designers unreasonably failed to engineer for a specific contingency.
Nonsense. First of all, the question is not what the buildings were designed to withstand, but what they reasonably should have been designed to withstand. Second, it is utterly preposterous to claim that nobody could have figured out what would happen if a 767 loaded with fuel crashed into the WTC. There’s no big secrets about structural engineering. Given the design of the WTC plus an impact and secondary fire on the order of 9/11, any structural engineer worth his salt could have done the worrk necessary to tell you the fate of those towers.
Magiver, contrary to what you apparently learned in “Law 101”, judges don’t get to just “rule” on cases whenever they want.
For your edification, a quick primer on how a case procedes:
A plaintiff files a complaint, in which the plaintiff claims that certain facts are true, and that, by law, this results in a liability on the part of one or more defendants. The plaintiff requests that the court award a remedy on the basis of this alleged liability.
The defendants are given a chance to answer the complaint. The answer will usually assert that the actual facts are different than the facts asserted to be true in the complaint, that even if the facts are true, the legal reasoning of the complaint is faulty, and that even if the legal reasoning is correct, there are other legal barriers to the requested remedy.
The parties commence “discovery”; a series of actions devised to help determine what the actual facts of the case are.
At some point in the process, before a trial to determine the true facts and any legal liability occurs, one side or the other may have the court rule on whether, even if the facts alleged by the other side to be true are indeed true, the law imposes the result sought by the opponents. The court is precluded at this stage from determining the true facts; it simply rules on the effect of the law.
Assuming that the court allows the action to procede past such a request, eventually the parties have a trial, at which time either a jury or a judge decide what actually happened, and what the law requires on the basis of the true facts.
In the case of the WTC ruling you cited, the judge has not gotten past step 4. He is precluded from ruling on the ultimate outcome; the evidence has not been presented to the finder of fact yet. All he can do is rule on the request made by the party asking for the ruling.
The judge was asked to decide if the Port Authority was protected from liability solely because it is a governmental agency. Sometimes government is protected from liability to private parties; in such situations it doesn’t matter if government has been negligent or not; you can’t recover from it.
This is not one of those occaisions.
The defense, by the way, was proposed because the Port Authority thought that the law on the subject was unclear, and that it might indeed be immune. Without reading the actual ruling, I can’t say if the Port Authority was being overly optimistic or not. Trust me that this is not their ONLY defense to the claimed liability.
Knowledge: a helpful tool to understanding life.
There is no logic or statistic you can apply to foresee the deliberate act of hitting a building with a large aircraft. You can’t design a building to withstand every contingency. Anything an engineer could design can be countered by an act of terrorism. ANYTHING. You need only know the design parameters.
It is utterly preposterous that someone should be expected to conceive of such a bizarre act.
Per your “primer”, I realize the general proceedures involved, and the narrowness of the defense motion addressed by the judge. I find it frustrating that multiple motions could not be ruled on (concurrently) to dismiss this.
So what is a terrorist attact that causes a 70 mph rollover? Remember, the manufacturer’s duty is to make the car reasonably crashworthy, period. From the perspective of the victim, it doesn’t make any diffference whether the other driver is Osama bin Laden or an inattentive teenager. Similarly, from the p.o.v. of the plaintiffs in the WTC suit, it doesn’t make a lick of difference whether those planes were intentionally crashed into the towers or whether they crashed accidentally.
Nonsense. Crashing airplanes frequently do bad things. Few of those bad things are caused by terrorism.
And here’s something to thing about: Now that we know beyond any dispute that terrorists like crashing airplanes into skyscrapers, do the folks in charge of the new WTC have a duty to reasonably engineer their buildings to withstand another such attack? You know, better insulation around the beams, better protection and location for emergency stairwells, that sort of thing? Or are you happy to condemn occupants to death because that’s just terrorism for ya?
Cost-benefit, amigo. It would be impossible and/or prohibitively expensive to comply with your silly strawman. But I guarantee you that designers of schools and houses have a duty to make their buildings reasonably fireproof, and to provide reasonable avenues for escape in the event of a fire. The plaintiffs claim the WTC was not so designed, and I’m willing to listen to their arguments and evidence before simply crying “terrorism!” and sticking my head in the sand.
If a reasonable alternative design existed at the time of construction that would have enabled the buildings to withstand such an impact, and that alternative design was overall safer and beneficial from a cost-benefit analysis? Sure, sign me up. That’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?
Yes, in large part because the insulation that protected the steel columns was shredded in the impacts. I’m unsure whether that was a reasonable design, and I’m willing to listen to the alternatives available at the time of construction. You just cry “terrorism” repeatedly and put your hands over your ears.
Wait . . . President Bush? Is that you?
You know, this is just silly beyond measure. We know how to make buildings bomb-resistant, precisely because of terrorist attacks across the world. New buildings incorporate those lessons, such as shatter-resistant glass, parking areas away from the structure, improved ventilation systems, etc. Are you seriously arguing that those steps shouldn’t have been taken? And are you seriously arguing that if the designers could have made the WTC reasonably resistant to an airplane crash, they should not have done so?
Magiver: if I were you, I’d ask for a a refund of the tuition you paid for your Law 101 class. It’s hard for me to imagine money that was less well spent.
What sort of multiple motions were you picturing? As far as I can tell, you want to skip discovery, skip preliminary motions, skip the trial, and go directly to a verdict. Is that about right?
