Wednesday, March 29, 2006

So a couple of months ago Dateline or some other similarly crappy tv magazine show went to Miller Park and 3 other ballparks and found the vendors continuing to serve beer to obviously drunk people.

So Miller Park's solution is that the vendor is no longer liable. Whoever serves the beer is liable if that drunk decides to drive home and kills himself or others.

Which means that charitable organizations that normally man some of the stands in order to raise money for themselves, now have to take on the liability of serving liquor. Which means that many of them will have to give up working the booths because they can't afford the deductible.

It's very different to make a bartender liable. But a person in a stadium can go to as many different stands to buy beer as they want. And what, the last person to sell them beer is the only one liable? What if someone is showing no signs of being drunk, but later drinks and drives? How was the person selling the beer supposed to know? How can that possibly hold up in court? "Well your honor, they didn't seem drunk."

Look, I get the idea, but I'm not a fan of any rule or law that is as subjective as this appears to be. Some random person attempting to raise money for their kids TBall team can get sued for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars because a drunk manages to not appear drunk. It's too subjective. There's too many factors. It's too big of a building with too many vendors.

This is like the story that came out last week that cops in Texas are going into bars and arresting them for being drunk. How do they get to decide who to give breathylyzers to? Most of the time they were in hotel bars. So they're arresting people who are going to go right upstairs in the same building and sleep it off. I'd even be ok with it if they waited for the asses to walk out the door, as then they are intending to drive. But walking into a bar and randomly choosing people to arrest because they appear drunk just violates too much for me. Drinking's not illegal, but we're going to arrest you for doing it anyway.

See the Miller Park story here.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's one of the things that frustrates me so much about our legal system. It's become so loophole ridden and so "letter of the law" that the spirit of the law is totally dead.

I think this is why my dad quit being a lawyer.