Day on Torts

Here is a great decision out of the state of Illinois, home of the World Champion White Sox. (I never thought I would type that phrase.)

The Fourth Division of the Illinois Court of Appeals said that “plaintiffs presented evidence that one result of the budget cuts mandated by defendant [corporate parent] was a decrease in the number of trained maintenance mechanics at the refinery, undermining the overall level of safety at the refinery. In fact, the fire was apparently caused by workers who were conducting maintenance on machinery that they were not trained or qualified to work on.” The opinion goes on to say that “Plaintiffs here alleged that defendant [parent] was a proximate cause of the decedent’s deaths via its own direct conduct, i.e., by mandating that [its subsidiary] Clark Refinery operate the refinery at “survival mode” and by reducing the capital expenditures to the “minimum sustainable level,” defendant created conditions within the refinery which posed an unreasonable risk of harm to refinery employees like the decedents. In other words, by mandating how Clark Refining was to operate the Blue Island refinery (at a 25% cost reduction), plaintiffs allege that defendant “interposed a guiding hand” in Clark Refining’s management of the refinery, leaving Clark Refining “no choice but to obey.”

After analyzing corporate law and various decisions concerning the relationship between parent and subsidiary corporations and the liability of parent corporations, the Court noted that “it has long been acknowledged that parents may be ‘directly’ liable for their subsidiaries’ actions when the ‘alleged wrong can seemingly be traced to the parent through the conduit of its own personnel and management,’ and the parent has interfered with the subsidiary’s operations in a way that surpasses the control exercised by a parent as an incident of ownership.”

The Government Printing Office has a host of information for you. Government Printing Office which provides electronic access to Federal Government documents. The site gives you access to official, published versions of legislative, executive and judicial documents, including the Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Register, and Presidential Materials.

For example, do you need an analysis of cases interpreting the U. S. Constitution? There is a publication on point. There is even a Cybercemetary, where old government websites are maintained.

Happy surfing.

Insurance Journal reports this: “There is no credible evidence to link the tort system either to the economic ills its critics claim or to the benefits they argue would be produced by altering it, according to a new study by the Economic Policy Institute.”

The article goes on to say that “the EPI report, The Frivolous Case for Tort Law Change, examines reports prepared by Tillinghast-Towers Perrin, a consulting firm whose clients include many of the world’s largest insurance companies. TTP’s reports are cited by President George Bush and his Council of Economic Advisors in arguing for tort reforms. The insurance consultants have spun a few high-profile but unrepresentative incidents into a horror story that is almost entirely unsupported by the facts,” said Chimerine. “It is cobbled together out of gross exaggerations, shreds of fact plucked out of context, and ‘secret’ data that cannot be examined by anyone but them. The result is a mishmash that bears little resemblance to actual research.”

Read the entire article here.