The next one hundred years

I formerly worked for a firm that provided expert testimony in product
liability cases, most often for counsel for the defense. My opinion
(opinion in the casual sense, not a legal opinion) based on that
experience is that the American product liability legal system is very
sick. You asked,

"And, if there is *no* safe way for a company in US, England or Australia
cover its back against lawsuits,"

There are some things that a company can do to lessen the risk of
devastating product liability lawsuits against it, but the short answer to
your question is "no". Time and again we saw baseless plaintiff cases
result in hundreds of millions of dollars in either settlement costs or
actual punitive damages awards. The most egregious case that happened
while I was there was the Dow silicone breast implant case. There was
nothing wrong with those breat implants: our engineers tested them,
analyzed them, punched them, squeezed them, flattened them, did all manner
of nasty things to them and only uncovered a few very rare failure modes.
There was nothing wrong with the breat implants, yet Dow was eventually
forced to pay billions.

The state of product liability law is very sad, and no doubt it is an
inhibitor to the development of the High Frontier. Anyone offerring
human travel to the High Frontier can "foresee" (that word has important
legal meaning) that the travellers will be subjected to great risk.
Basically, this means that when an accident happens, plaintiff lawyers can
have open season on the company, because it will always be easy to accuse
it of not doing enough to mitigate the risk. It is easier to accuse than
to defend against an accusation, and the standards of proof are lower in
civil product liability cases ("preponderance of evidence") than in
criminal cases ("beyond the shadow of a doubt").

Blech! Just gets me upset to think about it...

Ron
******

Lucio de Souza Coelho
02/12/02 10:43 PM
Please respond to spacesettlers

To:
cc:
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] The next one hundred years

From: "Ian Woollard"
To:
Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2002 7:43 PM
Subject: Re: [spacesettlers] The next one hundred years

> It's not entirely comparable.
>
> e.g. you can't sue Mount Everest; a Space Launch company
> can be sued.
>

Now we entered a very swampy arena, that of legal issues in space.

Nearly all the English-Speaking world uses a legal system that is
completely
alien for me. Brazil, as well as all the continental Europe and its
ex-colonies, use the Roman legal system, where you have a precisely
defined
set of laws and, when someone is prosecuted, positive and negative
evidences
are analyzed and compared with the Law and so there is not much room for
unexpected results. In the English system, however, as far as I
understand,
not only the laws (which are loosely defined, as far as I know), but also
precedent cases and the conjuncture of the society were a supposed crime
was
perpetrated are analyzed, and the lawyers have to convince the jury based
on
that - and, for that reason, verdicts are highly unpredictable.

So, I don't completely understand (for instance) the American legal system
(by the way, the paragraph above may have a lot of misinterpretations, and
I
apologize in advance for that), and so I can't say which legal cautions a
US-based space tourism company could take. If the space tourist signs a
bill
declaring that he is aware that space travel involves risks and that the
company should not be sued in case of his/her death, can someone still sue
the company?

And, if there is *no* safe way for a company in US, England or Australia
cover its back against lawsuits, why not base your company in another
country were the rules of the legal game are clear, stable and will not
allow inconvenient lawsuits? In the globalized world, you can choose the
exactly right place both in economic and legal terms for your enterprise.

> -Ian.
[snikt]