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Werribee Gorge Accident 10-May-2006 At 12:26:50 PM Ronny

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>On 10/05/2006 Chalk Free wrote:
>>If not for fear of litigation, why do we have so many captain obvious
>>warnings on things?

I never said that fear of litigation did not exist. Whether it is informed fear or not is another matter. And there can be a perfectly good reason for such warnings.

Whether its good policy or not, a common reason for the warnings is the scope of the duty of care. This is defined to include 'foreseeable' risks. You may be one of the fortunate people who are able to recognise all risks and don't ever need such things pointed out. But you can't deny that there are plenty of stupid people around. Assuming that there are such stupid people around, then it is forseeable that someone might not recognise what you would regard as a 'captain obvious' risk and might hurt themselves as a result. Therefore the duty of care extends to such people in these situations. In short, what may be captain obvious for some is not for others.

Of course the signs are there in fear of litigation. What they're trying to do is to meet the standard of care. By the same token when you drive your car on the left, or give way to some pedestrians, you do so out of fear of litigation in that if you didn't it'd be foreseeable that you might hit someone and cause them loss.

As for the common argument that increases in litigation push up insurance premiums etc, there are a couple of answers. Obviously this occurs to a certain extent - obviously if you run a business where it is fairly likely that someone may die if you're negligent your premiums are going to be more than if you are a dressmaker or something similar. That's common sense. But assume for the moment that this litigation doesn't occur - who pays for the hospital bills? Someone has to. And someone has to provide for that person's 24hr care, and for that person's kids food etc. The only other option is the government, which means tax, which means we all pay. So we have a situation where people paying massive amounts to get into a climbing gym (or whereever) to cover the insurance premiums are saying 'why should we have to pay for some idiot's problems?'. But what about the person who doesn't go to the gym - they're probably saying 'well I certainly shouldn't have to pay for it, I didn't even go there'.

The solution to this IMO is to increase the level of public funding of health and other care for injured persons. If that is done, then there will not be such high levels of pecuniary loss suffered by those that are injured, and hence insurance premiums will remain low. But this sort of thing isn't fashionable at the moment - we're all into 'user pays' which just means 'user sues'.

Whoa, who's on the soapbox now... I really should do some work. Luckily we've got a sick juror today so I've not much to do.
J