Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ralferoo | Hacker News Reader

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> The legal question is posed: Who is liable under Roman law?

My question is why does anybody have to be liable at all? Most normal people would consider this just to be a freak accident.

Sure, there's learning points that can be taken from it to prevent similar incidents - e.g. erecting a fetch around the field (why didn't you suggest that the field owner be liable) as it can be reasonably foreseen the situation of a ball escaping and being a nuisance to someone else (maybe it just startles someone on the road, maybe it causes a car crash, whatever), or legislating bars or plastic film on the barber's window, etc.

But here nobody seemed to act in any way negligently, nor was there any law or guidance that they failed to follow. It was just the result of lots of normal things happening that normally have no negative consequences and it's so unlikely to happen again that there's nothing useful to be gained by trying to put the blame on someone. It was just an accident.

> My question is why does anybody have to be liable at all?

This question mistakes what civil law is doing. A more accurate framing would be, “why does anybody have to bear the loss?”. But of course, somebody must. So the task of civil law here is to determine who. Certain policy choices will align better or worse with a sense of fairness, better or worse with incentives that could reduce future losses, etc.

"The loss" is already performing an abstraction to create something generic that can/must be assigned. The person who died is dead regardless of the creation of that assignable loss.

If there are too many instances of people dying in such situations, then the fundamental way to solve that is to prevent such situations from existing. A specter of civil financial liability is but one way of trying to do this, and having judges create common law theories is but one way of assigning that liability. Relying on those methods to the exclusion of others is not a neutral policy choice.

> nobody seemed to act in any way negligently

The whole point is that there's a legal system that allows a plaintiff to make an argument that there was negligence at play, and OP outlined a logical list of examples of how it could be argued up to the government itself being negligent for zoning. It's the job of the legal system to remove the ambiguity of "seemed", particularly in the context of tort and compensation.

This example just happens to be less obvious than a construction company building a house or bridge that collapses and kills people, and most cases in front of a court are equally ambiguous.

That's such a strange interpretation that disagrees with my intuition.

If the Yankees hit a practice ball out of their stadium and into my house, causing bodily harm to a loved one, I wouldn't be satisfied with any of the reasoning in your comment.

More generally, people are allowed to take on risk as per their own appetite, but legal liability allows risk-hungry individuals to be incentive-aligned with everyone else.

I don't actually find it a particularly strange interpretation.

Here's another lens:

I install cabinets in your kitchen. Your loved one trips, hits the cabinets, breaks their neck and dies.

Should I be liable in this case as well? I did a thing that was involved in harming your loved one... if the cabinet hadn't been there, they might not have died.

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In both cases, it's pretty clear that there's no intent to harm your loved one. At best you're arguing that it was "foreseeable" that hitting a baseball might harm someone, and that it wasn't "foreseeable" that installing cabinets would harm someone.

But clearly that's ALSO wrong, because we know people have been hurt hitting cabinets before.

So clarify how you'd assign blame in this case, and why it's different from the baseball case?

Basically - your stance is that risk is always a decision someone has made, but I find disagrees with my intuition. Risk is an inherent part of life.

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