An Australian woman, who worked for 11 years in a veterans’ club, has won a landmark legal case against her former employers on the grounds that her throat cancer was caused by customers smoking around her. This landmark decision is being hailed by anti-smoking activists everywhere.
Australia is following the trend set in the US courts over liability suits. Class actions, in which a series of litigants come together to sue over an injury allegedly caused them by a corporation or a even whole industry, had honorable beginnings. In the 1950s, the US automobile industry had been producing dangerous cars, highlighted by veteran consumer champion Ralph Nader in his seminal book “Unsafe at Any Speed”. Much litigation followed and the auto makers were obliged to clean up their act. Then came the ground-breaking class actions against companies that made or used asbestos. The resulting huge payouts and enforced reserves for contingency liabilities shattered the asbestos industry and nearly brought Lloyds of London, which had insured against medical risks, to its knees.
In cases such as these, the claimants could plausibly maintain that they never suspected the hazards to which they were being exposed. They were, therefore, justified in seeking compensation and maybe also punitive damages against the companies concerned. The risks they had run were unsuspected. Where commonsense is being turned on their heads is when claimants sue as a result of injuries that they suffered in circumstances where the risk was clear. The Australian lady cannot have been unaware of all the warnings about smoking.
As a result of this torrent of legal suits, companies, organizations and individuals are forced to go to extreme lengths to minimize risk. A case in point is that of the US Mountain Rescue Groups, who go out looking for lost and injured hikers and walkers. If one of these volunteer teams finds a casualty, but does not have a properly qualified first-aid specialist in their number, they are not permitted to administer even basic life-saving procedures, but must await the arrival of qualified help. Because of this absurdity, people who could have been saved might have died.
And even properly qualified personnel are now at risk. A doctor flying as an ordinary passenger responded to an appeal by the cabin crew to help a choking lady passenger. Unable to clear her breathing passage of the obstruction, he performed an emergency tracheotomy. He was later sued successfully in a US court by the woman for the disfiguring tracheotomy scar. It did not seem to occur to the jury that had this doctor not acted as he did, the woman would not have been alive to sue him.
The result of this will be that in seeking to minimize risk, such rulings will actually increase it. People will repress their humane reactions to help in a crisis, because they know that the consequences could very well be the loss of all that they have built up for their wives and children. All decent responses to the plight of another will become extremely hazardous. It must be very likely that if ever the lady with the tracheotomy scar has the misfortune to start choking on another airline flight, she will be left to die, because in the risk-averse world that she wanted, no one will risk helping her.
