CONTACTTRAFFICABOUT TOM VANDERBILTOTHER WRITING CONTACT ABOUT THE BOOK
« More Distracting Fun From the DFT
Smashing »

Good Policy or Insitutionalized Chutzpah?

In a piece for the Guardian a while back about taking the UK driver’s test, I joked about one of the questions on the test:

“Weird cultural biases crept in. One question asked about encountering a burns victim at an accident scene. I looked in vain for the only answer a driver in the litigious US could give: “Stay in your car, call 911, and do not touch the victim as you may accidentally hurt him even more and he will sue the shirt off of your back.”

This was not, of course, the right answer. But the recent developments in the case of a California driver who sued an office-mate who tried to help her after a car crash on Halloween night rather reinforced the notion, to me at least, that this is indeed is the only proper answer in the U.S.

In an ideal world I suppose we would wait for official emergency response, but what if the person dies while you stand watching and waiting — can you then be sued for negligence? Eroding the “Good Samaritan” law in this way rather strikes me as opening the door to institutional chutzpah, the classic definition being the case of the child who murdered his parents and then threw himself upon the mercy of the court, saying he was an orphan.

Any lawyers want to weigh in?

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under Traffic Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

Traffic Tom Vanderbilt

How We Drive is the companion blog to Tom Vanderbilt’s New York Times bestselling book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), published by Alfred A. Knopf in the U.S. and Canada, Penguin in the U.K, and in languages other than English by a number of other fine publishers worldwide.

Please send tips, news, research papers, links, photos (bad road signs, outrageous bumper stickers, spectacularly awful acts of driving or parking or anything traffic-related), or ideas for my Slate.com Transport column to me at: info@howwedrive.com.

For publicity inquiries, please contact Kate Runde at Vintage: krunde@randomhouse.com.

For editorial inquiries, please contact Zoe Pagnamenta at The Zoe Pagnamenta Agency: zoe@zpagency.com.

For speaking engagement inquiries, please contact
Jenna Meulemans at the Knopf Speaker Bureau.

Order Traffic from:

Amazon | B&N | Borders
Random House | Powell’s

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
U.S. Paperback UK Paperback
Traffic UK
Drive-on-the-left types can order the book from Amazon.co.uk.

For UK publicity enquiries please contact Rosie Glaisher at Penguin.

Upcoming Talks

[del.icio.us] [Digg] [Facebook] [Google] [MySpace] [Slashdot] [StumbleUpon] [Yahoo!]
Twitter
January 2009
M T W T F S S
« Dec   Feb »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031