USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

Main: normal long no graphics Contact Log archives Best log entries Other articles Site Search

Stardate 20010920.1354 (On Screen): If anything will demonstrate just how wrong liability law has gone, it will be the forest of lawsuits which will get filed in the wake of last week's bombing. The Bar has appealed to its members to not file lawsuits yet for fear of interfering with government investigations -- and rightly so. If anyone has been served, they're going to clam up for fear of revealing things which might end up costing them millions or billions of dollars in court. But look at some of the people that this guy says may end up getting sued: the designers of the WTC towers because the buildings collapsed? The flight schools who may have trained some of the terrorists?

The fundamental problem is something known as the principle of "joint and several liability". What it means is that if you're injured and a lot of other people are at fault, you can pick any one of them (usually the one with the most money or most insurance) and sue that one for the entire amount of damages and he'll have to pay up if he loses. The idea is that he then would sue all the others to get back what he'd lost, though that rarely happens. A different name for this is the "deep pocket fishing" principle. Now one of the strange things is that even if you yourself are primarily responsible for your own injury, you can still sue someone else even if they contributed a percent or two to the whole thing. Sound implausible? It isn't; there are cases of people who got paralyzed while driving drunk, and who successfully sued the bars that served them the drinks. Some cases of application of joint and several liability approach the lunatic, and it's time for it to be reigned in. When you have a case like this one which is so complex and where literally tens of billions of dollars in real damage were done, let alone "pain and suffering", it's going to jam up the court system for years.

Take, for example, the flight school. How could it possible be found to be negligent? Were they supposed somehow to read the mind of their students and determine that they were planning a completely unprecedented hijacking and suicide attack? Combine that with the fact that if they had refused to teach Arabs, they might have been subject to a quite legitimate civil rights suit, and you see that they're stuck. There's no way out for them. They are innocent victims in this; no more culpable than are the stores in Switzerland where the knives used were apparently purchased (who will probably also get served, eventually).

The group which benefits most from the current law is, needless to say, trial lawyers. These kinds of cases are usually taken on a commission basis, which does help victims because they couldn't otherwise afford legal representation. But it's not uncommon for the lawyers to take one third of the payout, and when you combine that with major league class action lawsuits, the quantities of money involved can be staggering. Some law firms collected fees in 8 figures from the asbestos suits, let alone the tobacco suits. But the potential damages from this could make those look tiny. Do we really want to see some law firm collect a commission in excess of a billion dollars? No-one should be cashing in that way on a national tragedy of this magnitude.

With tens of thousands of potential victims, there simply isn't any way that this can be dealt with through the normal mechanisms of our courts, even with class action. I think that it is virtually certain that Congress will pass a special law to handle grievances in this case in a much expedited fashion. What I hope is that they'll also take a closer look at tort law. Reform is overdue. (discuss)