Opinion ID: 2606599
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Liability Recognizing Driving Responsibility

Text: Philosophically, consideration of these statutes affords an occasion also to recognize the corrective catharsis achieved when juries impose damages through their verdicts. Professor Thomas F. Lambert, Jr. principally addressed these people-problems as societal responsibilities and remedies in one of his landmark reviews in Suing for Safety, Trial, Vol. 19, No. 11, at 48 (November 1983): An error does not become a mistake unless you refuse to correct it.       Accident Prevention Is Better Than Accident Compensation: `A Fence at the Top of the Cliff Is Better Than an Ambulance in the Valley Below.' A successful lawsuit and the pressures of stringent liability are one of the most effective means for cutting down on excessive preventable dangers in our risk-beleaguered society. The fastest, simplest and best method of correcting unacceptable driver attitudes is to recognize destructive conduct by financial responsibility. Anyone who has spent significant time driving on Wyoming's occasionally dusty and frequently snowy roads, recognizes that bad manners and lack of assistance to following vehicles on the part of the first vehicle often create a hazard to the vehicle coming from the opposite direction. Normally one can see the first oncoming vehicle as it approaches, but not the second vehicle, the movements of which may have been authored by the careless driving of the person in front. In terms of cause and result, Simmons could only more directly have caused the England injury if he had driven his vehicle into the nearly stopped oncoming pickup. I find a similarity to the deficiently moored boat in Petition of Kinsman Transit Company, 338 F.2d 708 (2d Cir.1964), cert. denied sub nom. Continental Grain Co. v. City of Buffalo, 380 U.S. 944, 85 S.Ct. 1026, 13 L.Ed.2d 963 (1965), where the ship broke loose, hit another ship, and both then hit a bridge, damming the river and flooding plaintiff's riverside property.    [A]n actor whose negligence has set a dangerous force in motion is not saved from liability for harm it has caused to innocent persons solely because another has negligently failed to take action that would have avoided this. 338 F.2d at 719.    No one would dream of saying that a shipowner who `knowingly and wilfully' failed to secure his ship at a pier on such a river `would not have threatened' persons and owners of property downstream in some manner. The shipowner and the wharfinger in this case having thus owed a duty of care to all within the reach of the ship's known destructive power, the impossibility of advance identification of the particular person who would be hurt is without legal consequence. 338 F.2d at 723-724.    [W]e would find it difficult to understand why one who had failed to use the care required to protect others in the light of expectable forces should be exonerated when the very risks that rendered his conduct negligent produced other and more serious consequences to such persons than were fairly foreseeable when he fell short of what the law demanded. 338 F.2d at 722-723.