Posted on 06/02/2002 12:11:52 AM PDT by kattracks
AMERICANS are not losing their minds, but they are afraid of using their minds. They are afraid to exercise judgment — afraid of being sued.In 1924 Will Rogers said Americans thought they were getting smarter because "they're letting lawyers instead of their conscience be their guide." Rogers was from Oologah, Okla., where in 1995 a child suffered minor injuries when playing unattended on the slide in the town park. The parents sued the town, which subsequently dismantled the slide.
Products come plastered with imbecilic warnings (on a baby stroller: "Remove child before folding.") for the same reason seesaws and swings are endangered species of playground equipment: fear of liability. A federal handbook morosely warns: "Seesaw use is quite complex." So seesaws are being replaced with spring-driven devices used by only one child at a time. Swings? Gracious, suppose a child falls on the — imagine this — ground. The federal handbook again: "Earth surfaces such as soils and hard-packed dirt are not recommended because they have poor shock-absorbing properties." No wonder a Southern California school district has banned running on the playground.
The early 20th century playground movement aimed to acquaint children with mild risks. In 1917, a movement leader said: "It is reasonably evident that if a boy climbs on a swing frame and falls off, the school board is no more responsible for his action than if he climbed into a tree or upon the school building and falls. There can be no more reason for taking out play equipment on account of such an accident than there would be for the removal of the trees or the school building." Today New York City cuts branches off trees so children will not be tempted to climb.
Today, when a patient complains of a headache, a doctor, even when knowing that an aspirin is almost certainly the right treatment, may nevertheless order an expensive CAT-scan. You cannot be too careful in a country in which six Mississippians have been awarded $150 million not because they are sick, but because they fear that they someday may become sick from asbestos-related illnesses.
Michael Freedman reports in Forbes magazine that 42 percent of obstetricians are leaving the Las Vegas area now that 76 percent of that city's obstetricians have been sued — 40 percent of them three or more times. Pharmaceutical companies are limiting research on "orphan drugs" that treat serious but rare diseases because tort liability is so disproportionate to possible return on investment.
"Dismissing a tenured teacher," says a California official, "is not a process, it's a career." Which is why in a recent five-year period only 62 of California's 220,000 tenured teachers were dismissed. The multiplication of due-process protections has turned jobs into a property right, undoing the progressive movement's dream that a civil service would end the tradition of treating public jobs as private property. In 1998, Pennsylvania reported that in the preceding 40 years only 13 teachers had been removed for incompetence. In New York state, terminating a teacher costs an average of $194,000 in legal bills — the cost in time and energy of school officials is extra. Termination is a seven-year process in Detroit.
By the mid-1970s, writes Philip K. Howard, due process "had become a kind of legal airbag inflating instantly" to protect individuals aggrieved about any adverse encounter with authority. Howard's book, "The Collapse of the Common Good: How America's Lawsuit Culture Undermines Our Freedom," is a compendium of the social havoc caused by the flight from making common-sense judgments. Americans now "tiptoe through the day," fearful that an angry individual with a lawyer will extort money from society while imposing irrational rules on society.
Oliver Wendell Holmes defined law as "prophecies of what the courts will do." But Howard rightly says that "nobody has any idea what a court will do." A Delaware River canoe rental company is found liable on the theory that it should have stationed lifeguards along miles of river bank. After a church was sued — unsuccessfully — because a parishioner committed suicide, many churches began discouraging counseling by ministers. When any harmful event can give rise to a lawsuit, the result is "law a la carte," changeable from jury to jury.
The cost of this — in money, health, lives, self-government and individual liberty — is staggering. Howard, a thinking person's Quixote, has founded (with Shelby Steele, Mary Ann Glendon, John Silber, George McGovern, Newt Gingrich and others) Common Good, an organization "to lead a new legal revolution to restore human judgment and values at every level of society."
To the barricades! The address of the barricades is: ourcommongood.com.
George Will is an ABC commentator and a columnist with Newsweek in Washington, D.C.
That's one.
Another is can you collect? Winning is cold comfort when your legal costs are 200K and you have no way to recover. That's why most "settlements" are nothing but pay-offs in a protection racket. There are lawyers who make a good living doing nothing but filing frivolous suits that never go to trial.
This reminds me of a story my husband told me about a woman who made herself some jelly toast with VAGINAL JELLY, had sex, then got pregnant, and sued the company, (for her own stupidity), because the package didn't specify "DO NOT EAT".
Unfortunately, being stupid isn't against the law. Too bad being a lawyer in a case like this isn't also.
Mrs K
And when doctors are afraid to exercise judgment the situation is critical.
I'm in one, Bona. I volunteraly paid for a life insurance policy on an employee, as I do for every employee, and when he sadly died, we directed the benefits to his ex-wife, as he had clearly directed!
I'm being sued by his son from a previous marriage for the 30 large, and his lawyer is a convicted pedophile!
I don't know whether to have some fun with this crap, or just select a calibre, but I'm busy fishing now. I may have to hire help............FRegards, bud
"The now-infamous case of the ground collision between a Piper Super Cub and a ground support truck in New Mexico serves as one of the low points in aviation product liability lawsuit history. In that accident, interests at the airport where the Cub attempted takeoff to film a television commercial disputed the arrangement at the last moment, and deliberately parked a truck in the path of the plane. Meanwhile, the pilot sitting in the back of the Cub (to accommodate a vision-blocking television camera up front) initiated takeoff, and — surprise — crashed into the truck. The pilot received serious head injuries.Using the rulebook for serious accidents where major corporations are involved, the high-priced lawyers got together and worked New Mexico jurors into a $2.5 million judgment for the pilot, based in part on the Super Cub’s lack of a rear shoulder harness (not required at the time of its 1970 manufacture) and the difficulty of seeing from the rear seat of the aircraft. Aside from the fact two major elements in the accident were virtually ignored in the judgment (the deliberate blocking of the aircraft’s takeoff path and the pilot’s willingness to move down the runway in a vision-obscured position) the most striking misplacement of priorities came in finding Piper liable for the absence of safety equipment that was mandated after the aircraft’s manufacture. The case is being appealed in the 10th Circuit Court.
Piper went bankrupt after this judgement, but eventually reorganized as "New Piper Aircraft". They don't make Piper Cubs any more due to the same liability concerns, and are even trying to prevent a group of enthusiasts from reviving them. From today's WSJ (paid subscribers only):
YAKIMA, Wash. -- In 1994, the future looked bleak for the Piper Super Cub, a fabric-skinned two-seat puddle jumper with a cult-like following among pilots.Amid a wave of liability lawsuits that sent the entire light-plane industry into a crisis, the Cub's maker went out of business. The company that re-emerged, New Piper Aircraft Inc., said it couldn't get insurance if it resumed building the airplane that had made Piper's name synonymous with grassroots aviation since the 1930s.
[snip]
Today, the Cubs are back, thanks to a new Super Cub clone that is delighting pilots and setting off a protest at New Piper. The single-engine planes have a new name -- Top Cub -- and a new maker, Mr. Richmond's Cub Crafters Inc. Over the last three years, the company has sold about 50 of the planes to law-enforcement agencies, weekend adventurers and other aviators. Cub Crafters is planning to introduce a version of the original, smaller J-3 Cub next year in hopes of capitalizing on the recent creation of a new federal sport-pilot license.
But New Piper is lobbying the Federal Aviation Administration to force Mr. Richmond to stop making the new planes and stick to restoring old ones. New Piper says it has no plans to ever make the planes again, but it is concerned that it will be seen as having "deep pockets" and get drawn into potential lawsuits involving Cub Crafters planes. "We think there are huge safety and liability issues here," says Mark Miller, a New Piper spokesman.
For this very reason Doctors are retiring and leaving the state left and right and companies are leaving or not coming Ms.
There are too many people and businesses who just cave in to them and pay up just to stay out of "Judge Judy Land". (Named after the TV judge that decides the case based on her opinion of the loser-to-be's attitude. Once that happens, facts are never allowed to get in her way)
We all know the old saying, "When stupidity is outlawed, only outlaws will be stupid".
Wait a minute. That didn't sound right. I'd better go look that up.
Eliminate contingency fees and permit them to charge their hourly fees only. Allow judges who throw their cases out as "frivolous" to slap them with a monetary penalty.
And if they lose case a trial, then charge the lawyer's firm with the legal costs of opposing counsel.
I think with these steps in place, it will force these ambulance chasers to make at least some effort to police themselves, since it could hurt them!
Reminds me when Mr Z took our first born out for a walk and didn't 'click' the stroller into place.....well needless to say the stroller folded up with our daughter in it. She was fine....he almost had a heart attack....and we laugh when we think about it. The look on his face was priceless!
I think this is a good idea. Especially when it is the state sueing, like with gun companies. It is a hollow victory to win and be ruined.
State lawyers never run out of money.
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