Comments on: Scaling Back Justice?
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- Your story on Dec. 6th about the young man with Cerebral Palsy was inspiring and fascinating. I never had a complete understanding of how exactly Cerebral Palsy affected the human body. You provided a very clear explanation, but beyond that, the segment must have given many parents and those afflicted with Cerebral Palsy a new direction to take to lessen the effects of the disease. As a parent myself, and blessed with two healthy adult children, I can't imagine having to be an inspiration to my child every day and disguise the feelings about my child. This was a wonderful segment and the young man featured was a true inspiration! A wonderful segment!
Regards,
Lynda Clark
Wanamassa, NJ 07712 - Reply to this comment
- What is clear is that the patient is the victim in the operating room and in the courts. This nation's doctors are poor examples of what is available in modern medicine although I must balance this by saying medical science as a whole is still barely out of the dark ages. Add to this the desire to maximize profit by both taking shortcuts in actual medical care and padding the bill with tests and unneeded procedures and the patient is again the victim.
If the victim goes to court he is at the mercy of a judge who could easily be biased or incompetent which could undermine the jury process. Again a victim.
Let's face it. A person loses any time the go into a doctor's office or a court. Sometimes he might get some assistance in his plight but it is seldom the result they most need.
I'll pass. - Reply to this comment
- It will never change. For centuries, Britain and European nations were held to be obedient to Kings, Lords, Earls, whose power was from nefarious connections. The leaders of America, with Jefferson as the helm, tried to eliminate these power regimes. But the American ignored these historical lessons. Now these lords are called attorneys. They control the legislature, the presidency, the press, and well..the supreme court. Not just the common man's interpretor, they are in control of everything in the us of a.
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- How little has changed in 30+ years! This excerpt, from 1978, illustrates the consequence of our failings in "obedience to the unenforceable". Hindsight can refute and/or validate George F. Will's remarks (below), but note the insight of the remainder:
"George F. Will, the perceptive Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, noted just one example in the difference between the old liberalism and a new liberalism:
"The old liberalism delivered material advantages that were intended
to enable people to live the lives they had chosen. The new liberalism,
typified by forced busing and affirmative action and the explosive
growth of regulation, administers 'remedies' to what society's
supervisors consider defects in the way people live."
(Newsweek, 23 Jan. 1978, p. 88; italics added.)
Decrease the belief in God, and you increase the numbers of those who wish to play at being God by being "society's supervisors." Such "supervisors" deny the existence of divine standards, but are very serious about imposing their own standards on society.
It is no accident that the lessening, or loss, of belief in certain absolute truths, such as the existence of God and the reality of immortality, has occurred at the same time there has been a sharp gain in the size and power of governments in many portions of the world.
Once we remove belief in God from the center of our lives, as the Source of truth and as a Determiner of justice, a tremendous vacuum is created into which selfishness surges, a condition which governments delight in managing. Trends become a theology. A religion of regulations emerges in which tens of thousands of regulations seek to replace the Ten Commandments.
And with this secular religion comes a frightening insistence on orthodoxy, enforced by the withdrawal and bestowal of benefits. Such governments inevitably tend to enlarge taxes and to stunt their citizens. John Stuart Mill observed:
"A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile
instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes?will find that
with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the
perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in
the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order
that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish."
"On Liberty", Great Books of the Western World, v. 43, p. 323.
This dwarfing of the individual is one of the prohibitive costs of a value-free society! The state will never wither away in a spiritually standardless society. It will simply swell and become more strong, more ominous, and more serious. Maxwell Anderson had a line in one of his plays in which a discouraged character asks plaintively why governments can't be 'small and funny' any more."
Neal A. Maxwell, "The Prohibitive Costs of a Value-free Society", address given to the Salt Lake City Rotarians, 7 February 1978, Ensign, Oct 1978, 52?55. Found at http://*******.com/yhwgkek - Reply to this comment
- "he's a lawyer with Covington and Burling, a powerhouse international law firm that represents some of the biggest corporations, and nations, in the world."
"So why would such a figure publish a book whose title promises "Life Without Lawyers"? "
The usual reason is that corporations don't want any laws messing with their "right" to make ooo-gobs of money, so they try to get the little people all stirred up to fight "intrusive government" and those pesky "trial lawyers". In truth, they don't give a rats azz about the "little people". To them, the only good law is the law that eliminates any obstacles to profit. If you have to die for them to make a profit, they don't care. You have no rights. Only the corporation has rights. How did we come to this horrible situation? Because we gave corporations all the rights of citizenship, but none of the responsibilities. - Reply to this comment
- BTW-while we're on the subject of frivolous lawsuits. Those lawsuits never get to a jury because they are disposed of by the judge in a ruling for summary judgment. If they are truly frivolous then the attorney gets sanctioned as the attorney who brought a lawsuit attempting to force the President to produce his birth certificate. The judge in that case dismissed the case and fined the attorney $20,000.00. Entirely appropriately in my opinion.
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- If it is done correctly, this is not a bad idea. We have taken categories of cases taken out of the courts before...employment discrimination cases, government contracts cases, IRS cases, social security cases and workmen's compensation cases are but a few examples. The key is that at the end of the administrative process, the matter can be appealed to court. Only a very, very few cases out of the many that went through the administrative process would ever go that far. The statute authorizing this administrative scheme could either put a cap on pain and suffering or prescribe the formula by which pain and suffering could be calculated. The same with legal fees. Punitive damages are not recoverable. My experience has been that most of these kinds of cases get settled long before going through the administrative process.
The biggest losers would be the trial lawyers. The big advantages are that this process takes a lot of junk cases out of the court system, cases are adjudicated much more quickly that they ever would be in the courts, legal costs are minimized, there are no wildly inconsistent punitive damages awards, decisions in similar cases are much more consistent with each other (at least generally) and when you have a group of administrative judges specializing in the area, the need for expert testimony is narrowed in both the number of experts and the scope of their testimony.
I litigated cases before several federal administrative agencies for 27 years before I retired. Such a system is workable and is far preperrable to resorting to the expensive process of resorting to the federal courts, which will take forever to even hear such cases, let alone to resolve them. - Reply to this comment
- legacyabq, under your kind of reasoning, as anything can be used to injure someone, then lets not prohibit anything. I think your right so I'll send my 11 year old to school with my loaded Glock for show and tell. Usually I don't bother replying to complete morons, but you made it personal.
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- A lot of these cases would disappear if we had a single payer health care system. For example cerebral palsy. People who have these children can't afford to care for their medical expenses. In Canada and the UK, these rare events are borne by everybody through their taxes. We educate them in schools through our taxes. But when it comes to care from a doctor, the family pays. Unless the family has great insurance through a large group, or are poor and Medicaid supplies care, a lawsuit ensues to try to get care for the child so the family is not impoverished. In the single payer countries, this does not happen. And if the insurance is a plan from a small employer (where the employee becomes a target for termination to save the company) or a private insurance (where the policy is likely to be terminated, or labeled pre-existing, or rates jacked up so high the policy is unaffordable) insurance doesn't work. Lawsuits provide a huge settlement that provides care for the child for life. In some cases I taught, the child was damaged by a mixup in connectors of gas in the delivery room. The mother got the wrong gas and died. The child was delivered alive but damaged.
It used to be not long ago, these children didn't even get an education. They were kept at home. Before that, most were turned over to the state to die from failure to thrive. So things have improved for them. Today they still live short lives for most but they are full lives to the extent they can live. Except for medical care. - Reply to this comment
- This amazing and seemingly brave man is my new hero even thought lawyers in general are the absolutely last on my list of people I'd like to socialize with or have to deal with in any way, shape or form. I have been saying for some years now that we've become a society based on fear about what is going to happen to us next and how we can avoid anything bad ever happening to us ever again. Sorry Charlie...life is unfair sometimes and things happen that are unpleasant. We suffer losses. We suffer injuries. We suffer injustices. These things, this suffering, is what should be making us stronger individuals NOT fearful little children who think we must be protected against anything ever happening to us or anyone we care about so we don't have to be disappointed or upset.
If people could only recognize that they can prepare for, judicate and eliminate every possibility that they could be injured or have an injustice done to them that they can fathom and then step off a curb and get hit by a bus or have a meteor fall on their home while they are sitting around watching TV in the safety of their one home. So what are we going to do? Make buses illegal? Make meteors illegal? Come'on people. Be aware, be dilligent and be as prepared for the unexpected as you possibly can by knowing how truly strong and resilient you are and that you can handle anything but please lets stop trying to legislate every single possible thing that could happen to anyone anywhere and then punish them when it does. I'm 55 and have to say that while there have been improvements where improvments needed to be made to keep us as safe as we can be there are so many things that are either against the rules or the law or that we feel we need to sue about that we no longer truly are free Americans but only micromanaged by the government that we citizens lobby to make laws to ease our own personal fears and issues. Common sense and morality can't be legislated.
Laws tend to make people 'feel' safe but from what I've seen over the course of my life they don't necessarily make people safe. Laws really don't protect us but simply give us a way to punish those who have already done the damage. We act as if we should be able to be as irresponsible as possible in the secure knowledge that the government is there to make sure we aren't harmed in some way. It's time to bring personal responsibility back to our society and stop putting the responsibility for our personal choices, actions, fears and words on others. - Reply to this comment
