It’ s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could

admin2019-07-30  42

问题 It’ s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes.
Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, a-mong other things, that you might— surprised! — fall off. The label on a child’ s Batman cape cautions that the toy "does not enable user to fly.
While warnings are often appropriate and necessary— the dangers of drug interactions, for example — and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn’ t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldnt have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sports in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. " We’ re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets arent designed to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’ s injury.
At the same time, the American Law Institute—a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight— issued new guidelines for tort law stating that companies need not warn customers of obvious dangers or bombard them with a lengthy list of possible ones. " Important information can get buried in a sea of trivialities, " says a law professor at Cornell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. If the moderate end of the legal community has its way, the information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability.

选项

答案 外面是一个危险的世界。出门的时候你可能被踏脚垫绊倒摔断腿,点燃火炉的时候你可能烧掉房子。幸运的是如果踏脚垫或者火炉没有能提醒你可能带来的灾难,那么一场成功的法律诉讼可以补偿一下你的麻烦的损失。在20世纪80年代早期就有了这种想法,那时候陪审团开始让公司为其顾客的不幸承担更多的责任。 感觉到这种威胁的存在,公司开始用写很长的警告标签来作出反映,试图预料每一种可能的事故。今天四角梯可能带有长达几英寸的警告标签,在这些警告中有你可能感到惊奇的内容:警告说你可能会从梯子上滑落。孩子们的蝙蝠侠斗篷的警告标签说:不能让使用者飞起来。 虽然有些警告是无可厚非和必要的,例如药物的相互作用——这些也是联邦和州的法律所要求的,但如果一个顾客受到伤害,我们也不清楚这种警告能否确保生产和销售商免于责任。当受到伤害的顾客与他们打官司的时候,50%的公司都会输掉的。 现在的形势开始改变了。虽然个人受伤的指控还像以前一样,但是一些法庭开始站在被告一边了,特别是在警告标签不能起到作用的案件中。5月份,伊利诺斯州Schutt Sports的总裁成功地赢得了关于一个美式橄榄球运动员受伤的法律诉讼,这个运动员在运动中受伤瘫痪,那时带了Schutt的头盔。Nimmons说到“我们真的很遗憾他变成了瘫痪,但是头盔不是设计用来防止这种损伤的。”法官也同意是运动本身的特性而不是头盔才是运动员受伤的原因。 与此同时ALI——一个由法官律师和学者组成的团体,他们的意见举足轻重——发布了新的行为伤害法的指导方针,指出公司不需要就明显的危害对顾客进行警告,也不需要尽可能的列出所有可能的危害。康奈尔法律院校的教授说:“重要的信息可能被淹没在这无用的琐碎信息之中”,他也帮助起草了这个指导方针。如果指导方针在法律界得到正确的执行,那么产品信息就可以真正为顾客提供有益的帮助,而不是为了避免法律责任。

解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://jikaoti.com/ti/9rcUFFFM
0

最新回复(0)