Why people hate lawyers …

This is a comment from a listserv of small firm practitioners that bears repeating:

making it inside…

” … I am referring to period from 1830 to 1860 when Massachusetts Supreme Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw was the nation’s leading figure on tort law, writing numerous decisions intended to insulate industrialization from the injury it inflicted on many of those coming around it. Shaw’s belief was that the industrial revolution was a good thing and needed a bit of a boost, and that allowing those injured by industry (whether employees who died on the job from exploding boilers or neighbors of railways who had their homes burned down from sparks caused by the railway) to recover would strangle the very industry his state and the rest of the nation needed.

That rationale is little different from what we here today by those advocating “tort reform,” and it is part and parcel the reason we see what might seem to be the “loopy” warning labels. They are not “loopy” at all. They are calculated. And if we laugh at them, we should also be laughing at the coming death of the concept that those who injure others should have to compensate them for that injury.

Categorized in: Personal Thoughts