BobbyD posted:bigkid posted:If I remember my business law, in these kind of cases it will come down to whether the railroad reasonably attempted to prevent such fires from happening, whether a reasonable man could decide they bore fault for it (and again, this is what I recall).
"one case I remember, radiation machine used in cancer treatment had a bug in the software controlling it that ended up basically killing a patient, was ruled under vicarious liability)."
Interesting, would this apply to Boeing as well?
Interesting question. From what I know of vicarious liability cases, the activity involved is so inherently dangerous that basically in doing it the person/organization accepts that fact, that if something goes wrong in effect they will be found responsible/negligent even if they did everything they could. My opinion would be no, that given the relative safety of aircraft that Boeing would not be assumed to be liable automatically. Put it this way, Boeing planes achieve millions of flight miles every year and airline travel is one of the safest forms of travel in general, so it would be hard to argue that this represents something so risky Boeing is liable no matter what it did. As a result, this comes down to standards of liability and negligence, did Boeing in putting the changes into the 737 Max follow acceptable procedures in how they designed, built, tested and rolled them out? If once issues were raised with the design, did they act in a timely fashion to correct them? If they were found failing in one or more of these areas (and there are plenty more,liability and negligence are specialized area of law, this is just a simple example), then they could be found liable, and if they were found to have violated the last one, where they knew they had potentially big problems and didn't act, negligence would come into it (and I apologize to those with legal training in advance, the law is based on precise use of terms, hopefully I haven't boinked these ones too much
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With the Colorado fire, I doubt there would be vicarious liability, while obviously there is risk with a coal fired steam engine travelling through a forest, the risk doesn't come to the level that vicarious liability would kick in, again it would come down to if the Durango and Silverton in operating the train followed acceptable practices to ameliorate the risks involved or if somehow they weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing, whether industry best practices, their own policies and procedures and/or regulatory and other outside influences (for example, if a government agency issued an alert that the forest involved was in high danger of fire, due to dry conditions/drought or because of heavy, hot winds like the Santa Ana winds in California, and they continued to operate, that could be considered negligence).
