physeter

Strega and Jake,

Could the verdict be a Blue-Tail Fly?

Perhaps not in the modern United States, given the origin of the song, but definitely still a possibility in Sudan, Mali, Mauritania, the Arabian Peninsula, Red China, and North Korea.

Jimmy Crack…[Read more]

Thanks, Reg 🙂

Reg the Fronkey Farmer wrote:
World of Woo: A study into ‘truth relativism’.

As I started reading, my first thought was that it was hilarious this was posted on the New York Post—a publication whose target demographic is gut-feelers on one side of the political spectrum.

When I went to read the comments it was even more funny. I am surpr…[Read more]

Have a great week everyone!

Wittgenstein, certainly one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, famously once said, “The belief in the causal nexus is a superstition.”

Yet, causation is a superstition that plays a huge role in the law, as does time.

Laughs, you added that the owners flatulence acted in a Pavlovian way by training the horse to over-react and rear up at all similar sounds.

Our school lesson on Pavlov was interrupted when the dinner bell rang and we all went to the canteen.

Unseen,

“Shrink-flation” is an externality created by just plain old inflation.

When the Federal Reserve at the demand of Congress and the Presidents Trump and Biden prints more money than the supply of goods and services and thus increases demand and overall prices, that increase in prices includes the cost of ingredients and capital used in…[Read more]

Laughs, you added that the owners flatulence acted in a Pavlovian way by training the horse to over-react and rear up at all similar sounds.

I am sure an argument for proximate cause could be made for the supplier of whatever culinary delights the owner enjoyed despite knowing they caused him flatulence.

I don’t think I’d worry if I was the horse 🙂

Unless the plaintiff calls Doctor Dolittle as an expert witness and is able to uncover a nasty case of nerves/anxiety easily treatable with xanax and willfully refused by the equine who had reacted similarly to numerous backfiring from his owner’s rear end as well as his jalopy.

Under those cir…[Read more]

Or the car driver for not maintaining his car adequately, enabling it to backfire. The horse of course had input through it’s reaction which unseated the rider. The ambulance driver chose the hospital to which the rider was going. To a degree, he’s a link in the sequence chain. The hospital allowed the rider-patient to become infected – per…[Read more]

Strega wrote:
The question is, which occurrence would be ‘proximate cause’ for the riders death?

So what you’re getting at is the family of the deceased should sue the horse, yeah?

Proximate cause is the fulcrum of the insurance industry. One of the sample narratives which challenged the learner to pinpoint proximate cause, went something like this:-

A car backfires

A horse shies and tosses its rider

The rider breaks a leg in the fall

The ambulance takes the rider to hospital.

The rider contracts a virus from another…[Read more]

Simon that is kind of correct in a nonlegal framing.

Unseen, causation as an aspect of legal claims can get murky. By a preponderance of the evidence an action or omission by defendant creates an undue and forseeable risk of harm. Said omission or commission has to be the actual cause (sometime referred to as but for cause) and the proximate cause. Proximate cause takes a lot of explaining and…[Read more]

Autumn,

Interestingly enough, some parents call dairy milk “Moo Juice” to encourage their young toddlers to drink their milk. I wonder if this California asshole or the dairy industry lawyers would call Child Protective Services on such parents?

jakelafort wrote:
As one might expect it is not required of a plaintiff to demonstrate the PARTICULAR harm resulting from the negligence, only that some harm of that nature might ensue.

In other words, that they were acting recklessly without due regard to the right thing to do.

Davis wrote:
No you cannot know what consequences are going to be. You can assume and/or predict but you cannot know. That is an essential motivation for taking deontological ethics seriously.

This is true.  All we have are: 1) the (joint) goal; 2) tried and trusted methods designed to achieve it.  So it is reasonable to rely on the methods, b…[Read more]

jakelafort wrote:
Forseeability and proximate cause are concepts in negligence law and elements of claims. So causation or our perception/understanding of it is an integral aspect of legal claims. As one might expect it is not required of a plaintiff to demonstrate the PARTICULAR harm resulting from the negligence, only that some harm of that…

[Read more]

Consequences?

Consequences of lying?

Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to _________.

Forseeability and proximate cause are concepts in negligence law and elements of claims. So causation or our perception/understanding of it is an integral aspect of legal claims. As one might expect it is not required of a plaintiff to…[Read more]

No you cannot know what consequences are going to be. You can assume and/or predict but you cannot know. That is an essential motivation for taking deontological ethics seriously. You can very likely know the consequences of dropping a large object from a high distance. You cannot know the consequences of lying. There are simply too many unknowns.…[Read more]