[PRCo] Re: Wabash Tunnel in Operation

[trams2 at comcast.net]

I'm not sure that I'm quite as liberal as Joshua in the concept of "someone has to pay."  If I am responsible and the damages exceed my assets, why should someone else have to cough up?  That's income redistribution, not justice!
Ed

-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: Joshua Dunfield <joshuad at cs.cmu.edu> 

> 
> Ed Lybarger wrote: 
> 
> > It has been my experience that lawyers, like all other professionals, have 
> both good 
> > actors and bad actors. What bothers me more than the relative worthiness of 
> any 
> > profession is the concept that American people don't have to be responsible 
> for their 
> > own actions, choosing instead to blame everything on others. 
> 
> If a pedestrian is run down in a Braddock Avenue crosswalk in the same 
> place as two previous crashes, should the people who decide not to put in 
> a stop sign have *no* responsibility? Sure, the driver who failed to yield 
> deserves most of the blame, but after two previous incidents it should be 
> incumbent on the people who control the street to address the situation. 
> In principle, the Wabash Tunnel is no different from Braddock Avenue; 
> in practice, I don't think there's a genuine problem with the Wabash 
> Tunnel...unlike Braddock Avenue. 
> 
> > If it's our own fault that we kill ourselves, why should others pay? 
> > 
> > Ed 
> 
> They shouldn't. But juries in personal injury cases routinely find that 
> blame is shared. Sometimes the party most at blame can't pay, which means 
> that they get off and a third party (say, PAT) ends up paying out of 
> proportion to its responsibility. It's not ideal, but do you have a better 
> way? *Someone* needs to pay, if at all possible, or a party that's really 
> not at fault gets nothing. 
> 
> Seems to me that an awful lot of public concern about people "not taking 
> responsibility" is based on sensationalist accounts of "runaway juries". 
> People watch a 60 second news clip and think they know more about the case 
> than the jury, who sat through hours of actual evidence. 
> 
> Best, 
> -j. 
>