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Posted by David Sherman [216.18.131.142] on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 12:55:54 :
In Reply to: You mean the sheople!!!!!!! posted by clueless [201.202.24.94] on Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 12:38:26 :
You're right, when your lawyer is working for you, he's a good guy. I know a retired judge who says pretty much the same thing, that everyone complains about lawyers and makes jokes about lawyers until they need a lawyer.
These product liability lawyers wouldn't have gotten where they are without 50 years of juries awarding huge damages for personal injuries caused by the plaintiff's own stupidity. Did you know they actually used to ship TVs with schematics pasted inside the back cover, so a person who was reasonably handy (or a repairman who didn't happen to have the manual on his shelf) stood a fair chance of fixing it? But then someone got badly shocked trying to fix his own TV and his lawyer convinced the jury that it was the manufacturer's fault for pasting the schematic inside the set, which encouraged him to try to fix it himself. The immediate effect was no more schematics shipped with anything, and the "no user-serviceable parts inside" warning. Eventually that wasn't even enough, so the manufacturers quit selling service manuals to customers who asked. After a while, they quit even producing service manuals at all, and even expensive products became disposable. Still, that doesn't keep people from taking them apart and trying, so now we have tamper-proof screws on lots of things (like this inverter).
I predict that the next phase will be all housings of everything glued or welded together so they can't be gotten apart without destroying them, along with prominent warnings against turning the device on or attempting to use it for anything. That way, no matter how the fool gets hurt, the lawyers can say that the person disregarded the prominent warnings against using the product.
Of course even that is no absolute defense in our tort system. Some things are considered so dangerous that if someone gets hurt by them even when the owner did nothing wrong, the owner is still at fault. The standard law school example is if you own a lion, and the lion is kept in strong cage, but a powerful earthquake destroys the cage and the lion escapes and attacks someone, you're still responsible even though you did everything right and even though the earthquake was an act of God, simply because lions are essentially dangerous. That's getting to be the way the courts are regarding tools of any sort. We can blame the lawyers, but the real problem is judges and juries over the years who were too soft-hearted to say to the poor crippled schmuck sitting there in his wheelchair and body cast, "Sorry, dude, but it was your own fault."
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