There Ought To Be A Law

I try not to be one of those people who goes around demanding legislative action to correct every unfortunate event he sees on the news; by and large, there are laws on the books that already address most of these situations, and either there isn’t enough enforcement/prosecution, or people are much stupider than was believed at the time the law was passed. The best legal minds I have ever known will all tell you that laws passed to correct a single event are almost always a bad idea – and will generally serve only to make a bad situation worse. But I have to admit that I’m almost ready to make an exception for a case I saw the other day…

A story being reported on ABC News Online this week tells the story of a family whose toddler crawled out a doggie door and drowned in their pool, who are outraged that the doggie door was sold without a warning that small children can egress through such an opening, and are suing the manufacturer. In this particular case, I don’t know if Florida has a law requiring that swimming pools be fenced in to prevent accidents of this kind (not all states do), and I don’t actually know if state laws governing child endangerment would apply, but I’d like to suggest a law criminalizing lawsuits of this type. That is, if a jury of your peers decides that you are only filing suit to deflect blame or attention away from the fact that you are apparently too stupid to realize that (A) small children will crawl through ANY small opening they find and (B) that a doggie door IS a door leading to the outside, you deserve some form of legal sanction…

Now, I’m sure some of you are going to get upset with me for blaming the family in this case, since they are the ones to have suffered the loss. So let me be very clear: I am not urging the local authorities to charge the child’s caregivers with felony endangerment or any other crime on the basis of the original event. I just feel that suing the manufacturer of the doggie door is the worst form of frivolous lawsuit, especially since there is no indication whatsoever that a warning label would have made any difference to the events of this case. The child’s mother is on record as stating that she didn’t believe there was any chance he could fit through such a small opening, and would doubtless have ignored the warning label (if there had been one) for the same reason. It’s only because a check of the records indicates that this happens a few times each year that somebody got the bright idea of bringing suit in the first place…

The fact is that if you fail to take any safety precautions to prevent drowning accidents in your pool and then also fail to keep a close eye on your young children – an unfortunate combination of events that happens every year in America – then it is not the fault of the people who manufacture the windows, doors, screen doors, crawlspaces, basements, doggie doors or cat flaps the children escaped out of that a tragic event ensued. I’m not saying that the event wasn’t a horrible tragedy; I’m saying that blaming somebody else for your poor judgment is a complete abdication of personal responsibility no matter how tragic the results happen to be, and suing them is at best an attempt to deflect the blame for your own failure and at worst an attempt to profit from your own stupidity by filing a “deep-pockets” lawsuit…

And there ought to be a law against those things…