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Werribee Gorge Accident 12-May-2006 At 1:21:04 PM Ronny

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On 11/05/2006 patto wrote:
>The problem with lawyers is that they think like lawyers. (No offense,
>intended but if you have studied law you probably know what I mean.)
>

I rather think that the problem with normal people is that they do not think like lawyers... :)

The original point of this was that people don't take responsibility for themselves anymore. Its easy to justify a statement such as this by reference to a single example - but that won't cut it to support a general statement. Lawyers tend to think from general principle, rather than specific example, and hence the conflict (not that the lawyer's way is necessarily better).
The original statement is probably true. My point was that its not necessarily "the legal system's" fault. Certain lawyers may behave unethically, but its not necessarily systematic, and after all, if people don't like the law they can change it - through parliament.
Also, some thought needs to be given to whether the change identified is part of a broader theme. It may be that there is indeed a trend towards making people/corporations/etc more accountable for accidents that they have a hand in causing. That manifests itself in a bad way when people bring spurious claims against national parks or anyone else, but there are many positive elements. For example work places are generally far safer than they were even 50 years ago. There are all sorts of controls to attempt to prevent deaths on building sites that didnt' exist in the past. This is a direct result of the fact that the employers are being held responsible for the workers death. Surely no one can sugges that this isn't a good thing (especially seeing as most of us don't choose to work, but have to if we want to eat).

So I agree with the original thread to an extent. Yes, people should take responsibility where an accident is their fault. Yes, people should be prevented from using the threat of litigation as a tool to extract money where none is due. Yes, living in a world sanitized to fit the lowest common denominator is boring. But these things are perfectly consistent with traditional legal principle (afterall the principle hasn't changed over the timespan we're talking about). There are certainly problems to be addressed - but merely attacking the legal 'system' or 'profession' generally will not solve anything. Instead it will result in throwing the baby out with the bath water (to reuse a metaphor from before).

J