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Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - yvonne - 04-14-2016

How do you put a value on a life?

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - washingtonismoney - 04-14-2016

(04-14-2016, 03:12 PM)Yvonne link Wrote:How do you put a value on a life?

Quote: The current rise in the value of life is based on the work of Professor Viscusi, who wrote his first paper on cost-benefit analysis as a Harvard undergraduate in the early 1970s. He won a prize and found a career.

The idea he and others have since developed in a long string of studies is that differences in wages show the value that workers place on avoiding the risk of death. Say that companies must pay lumberjacks an additional $1,000 a year to perform work that generally kills one in 1,000 workers. It follows that most Americans would forgo $1,000 a year to avoid that risk — and that 1,000 Americans will collectively forgo $1 million to avoid the same risk entirely. That number is said to be the “statistical value of life.”

Professor Viscusi’s work pegs it at around $8.7 million in current dollars.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulation.html?_r=0

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - TrumpCard - 04-14-2016

That's all well and good until you have a kid who is your pride and joy and your legacy in this world. 

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - washingtonismoney - 04-14-2016

(04-14-2016, 04:32 PM)TrumpCard link Wrote:That's all well and good until you have a kid who is your pride and joy and your legacy in this world.

Of course. A life is priceless to the people who know the departed as a human, with a soul. Nevertheless, society has to act differently.

To take one example: We all pay for each others' healthcare, whether publicly (because of Medicare) or privately (because private insurance's business model relies on many not-using customers subsidizing active customers). So we have to make collective decisions about what to spend on, and what not to spend on. Would you pay $100 billion to extend an octogenerian's life by a year? The grandchildren would be tempted. But society, unfortunately, can't allow it -- otherwise we'd have no economic resources left. It's not pleasant, I'll grant you. If you prefer not making those decisions, solve death.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - needle - 04-14-2016

Do we think a death like this one could have happened at an unsettlingly large number of places, or were the decisions made by Kal trainers/staff/coaches a very tragic but rare exception to the norms for strength-and-conditioning drills within college football?

By bringing up the question, it's clear that I'm uncertain. I'm leaning towards the latter, though.

This year:

http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/college/solomon-jackson-buffalo-football-player-dies-workout-article-1.2548872

Quote:  BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — The University at Buffalo says defensive end Solomon Jackson has died a week after experiencing a medical emergency during a team conditioning session.

Older article, from 2012:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-athletes-deaths-prompt-new-workout-guidelines/

Quote: (AP) The most dangerous time for amateur athletes may not be during the heat of the game or even in rigorous practices. A total of 21 college football players have collapsed and died during conditioning workouts since 2000 - many on the first few days, when even the fittest players are often pushed too hard. 



Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - TrumpCard - 04-14-2016

I am so sorry for your loss ferrari. A check of any amount would be poor consolation.  I don't mean that such acts should go uncompensated, and I understand that getting something may be better than getting nothing, but I still recognize the futility of trying to assign a monetary value to the loss.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - Rally - 04-14-2016

(04-14-2016, 08:41 PM)TrumpCard link Wrote:I am so sorry for your loss ferrari. A check of any amount would be poor consolation.  I don't mean that such acts should go uncompensated, and I understand that getting something may be better than getting nothing, but I still recognize the futility of trying to assign a monetary value to the loss.

Thank you.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - Hulk01 - 04-15-2016

We put a price on human life because if we fail to, a victim's family gets nothing (the lesser reason) and society loses the deterrent effect of money penalties for behavior that can kill people.

Removing the civil liability would force us, in cases like this, to choose between doing nothing or punishing the act as a crime.  And we would struggle to gain a consensus that behavior like this should be labelled, and punished, as criminal.




Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - Mick - 04-15-2016

(04-15-2016, 04:28 AM)Hulk01 link Wrote:We put a price on human life because if we fail to, a victim's family gets nothing (the lesser reason) and society loses the deterrent effect of money penalties for behavior that can kill people.

Removing the civil liability would force us, in cases like this, to choose between doing nothing or punishing the act as a crime.  And we would struggle to gain a consensus that behavior like this should be labelled, and punished, as criminal.

Tough to criminalize a company.  In an undergraduate management (not law) class, the professor held that Ford's big mistake with the Pinto was that they misjudged what a life was worth...that when it was apparent that the Pinto's exploding gas tank would cost x number of lives, Ford's brain trust thought that $200,000 per life and $67,000 per burn injury with 180 burn deaths, 180 burn injuries and 2,300 cars damaged (at $700 per car) resulted in a risk of $49 million, whereas the replacement cost of $11 each for 11 million Ford Pintos and 1.5 million trucks was $135 million, therefore Ford thought they were justified in not fixing the tanks.  The Pinto was introduced in May, 1968.  The first legal case came in 1972, and post-death, post-appeal, the judgment was $3.5 million.  In a subsequent case, Ford was charged by the Indiana Supreme Court of criminal recklessness and negligent homicide.

Oops.

Here's the case study if you're interested.

http://users.wfu.edu/palmitar/Law&Valuation/Papers/1999/Leggett-pinto.html

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - CornFed - 04-15-2016

Seems like an appropriate time for a word from Milton:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jltnBOrCB7I



Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - TrumpCard - 04-15-2016

We have a justice system (of which I am a part), and we try our best to bring justice to the victims and perpetrators of wrongs.  In the business disputes I handle, we do a better job of approximating justice, though, still, we often don't get it right. 

In matters relating to injuries and deaths, it seems to me that the justice system is much worse at finding true justice, if there is such a thing in those cases.  I am not saying that our system is worse than the other options or that we would be better off with no available remedy or deterrent.  I am just saying that people like Ted Agu's family are not made "whole" by a payment of money.  They are left empty emotionally and they are enriched monetarily far more than they would have been absent the injury. 

Some proof that we really do have difficulty measuring the monetary value of injuries comes from two recent verdicts in the field of right to privacy / emotional distress.  Is it a coincidence that, within a period of two weeks, Hulk Hogan and Erin Andrews each received a verdict with emotional distress damages of precisely $55 million?  Those are two extremely different cases, though in both instances, the injury can be summed up as a loss of privacy.  We'll never know exactly how the juries reached their verdicts, but I suspect that the jury in the second case (Hogan) just picked the number from the first case (Andrews) because the second jury could not agree on any other way to evaluate the damages. 

The reality is, we don't have a way to evaluate the damages.  When my wife heard about the Andrews verdict, she said that she would have awarded more.  I asked how much, and she said she would have awarded whatever amount Andrews sought.  At least my wife was honest in admitting that it would be impossible for her to place a monetary value on the injury.  I just think she was wrong to think that Andrews (or anyone else) is any better equipped to set that amount. 

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - Mick - 04-15-2016

(04-15-2016, 11:59 AM)TrumpCard link Wrote:We have a justice system (of which I am a part), and we try our best to bring justice to the victims and perpetrators of wrongs.  In the business disputes I handle, we do a better job of approximating justice, though, still, we often don't get it right. 

In matters relating to injuries and deaths, it seems to me that the justice system is much worse at finding true justice, if there is such a thing in those cases.  I am not saying that our system is worse than the other options or that we would be better off with no available remedy or deterrent.  I am just saying that people like Ted Agu's family are not made "whole" by a payment of money.  They are left empty emotionally and they are enriched monetarily far more than they would have been absent the injury. 

Some proof that we really do have difficulty measuring the monetary value of injuries comes from two recent verdicts in the field of right to privacy / emotional distress.  Is it a coincidence that, within a period of two weeks, Hulk Hogan and Erin Andrews each received a verdict with emotional distress damages of precisely $55 million?  Those are two extremely different cases, though in both instances, the injury can be summed up as a loss of privacy.  We'll never know exactly how the juries reached their verdicts, but I suspect that the jury in the second case (Hogan) just picked the number from the first case (Andrews) because the second jury could not agree on any other way to evaluate the damages. 

The reality is, we don't have a way to evaluate the damages.  When my wife heard about the Andrews verdict, she said that she would have awarded more.  I asked how much, and she said she would have awarded whatever amount Andrews sought.  At least my wife was honest in admitting that it would be impossible for her to place a monetary value on the injury.  I just think she was wrong to think that Andrews (or anyone else) is any better equipped to set that amount.


Let's say it was Rosie O'Donnell whose rights were so callously violated.  Do you think the jury award would have been the same?

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - martyup - 04-15-2016

I rode to school every day from 6th grade to 8th grade in the backseat of a Pinto.  I was lucky.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - oldalum - 04-16-2016

(04-15-2016, 09:45 PM)Mick link Wrote:Let's say it was Rosie O'Donnell whose rights were so callously violated.  Do you think the jury award would have been the same?

It is well known that jury awards for non-economic damages (emotional distress, pain and suffering) vary wildly because that type of harm is completely subjective, and juries are influenced by factors other than those a disinterested observer would consider relevant. Doesn't mean they should be abandoned. Some states have a dollar cap on non-economic damage awards for medical malpractice injuries; some have proposed ranges of allowable non-economic damages for different severities of injury (e.g., the range would be much higher for quadriplegia than for loss of vision in one eye).

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - Hulk01 - 04-16-2016

And it's worth adding here that the monetary award isn't meant to cover, somehow, the losses, but to penalize the behavior and deter future similar behavior.  When many people say "how can they possiblly say that Erin Andrews suffered that amount of pain and suffering?" I think they are expressing an aversion to lawyers and the system. and misundertstanding the principle behind monetary damages.  Clearly, you cannot say that X amount of pain and suffering somehow is worth Y dollars.  You really are saying that acting as the defendant acted, with reasonable awareness of the harm it could cause, merits a penalty of that magnitude.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - TrumpCard - 04-16-2016

We can't say why the jury awarded the particular amount of money, but the fact is that the jury instruction for personal injury damages states that the damages are supposed to be the amount that would put the plaintiff in a position as good as if the wrong had not occurred. Punitive damages is the component intended to punish the defendant and deter similar conduct in the future.

Re: Today in opponent legal attrition - CowboyIndian - 04-16-2016

(04-15-2016, 09:58 PM)martyup link Wrote:I was lucky.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FatHLHG2uGY