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« More on Red's Trading Post | Main | Crime in South Africa »

VA to pay settlement in VA Tech shootings

Posted by David Hardy · 17 June 2008 11:52 AM

Story here.

UPDATE: suits for wrongful death are created by statute (at common law, if you were dead you couldn't sue, and your survivors had no right to, either, because they hadn't been directly hurt). The statutes are sometimes rather narrow -- rather than recovering for a lifetime of lost wages, some say you recover only what the deceased would have likely given you -- which will be high for a child of the deceased, but low for a parent. [Further update: I can't figure out the theory of liability, either, and that probably had a lot to do with the amount. Maybe failure to commit the shooter after finding him dangerous? But those decisions are usually immune from suit].

Off topic, but I once read a law rev. on how the statutes came to be. In early railroading days, 1840s or so, there were a lot of accidents and deaths. Train crashes and people getting hit, because folks were not used to gauging the speed of things that fast.

Nobody could sue, so the railroads shirked it off. Then some enterprising British attorneys applied the common law deodand (think I spelled it right) under which if farm animal killed a man, it was forfeited to his family. They won, and the locomotive was forfeited to his family, and the RR had to buy it back. I think deodand was strict liability, not negligence. The animal, or locomotive, killed someone and is forfeit -- whether the owner was negligent or not made no difference.

RRs got most disturbed, and got legislation passed which abolished deodand, in exchange for letting survivors sue for damages in wrongful death. It was a lot cheaper to pay damages than to buy back a locomotive every time it hit someone!

13 Comments

Jim | June 17, 2008 12:20 PM

$100,000 per victim? I realize there is a cold, hard calculus for putting a value on a human life, for purposes such as this, but that seems pretty low.

AMB | June 17, 2008 1:06 PM

$100,000 per victim? For the parent of a student who was a senior, it's possible that the parent had already paid VA Tech over that amount in tuition, fees, room, and board. For out-of-state students, total costs per year for an undergrad student can be about $28,000.

David M. McCleary | June 17, 2008 1:46 PM

I do not understand the liability theory. How was the university negligent??? There is no duty to protect students. Police cannot be held reasponsible for wrongful death unless there are special circumstances, why would there be a different standard fot a state run university.

Unless the university was responsible because they did not allow students to protect themselves (ie prohibited guns)( as I hold my tongue in my cheek:) )

GMC70 | June 17, 2008 1:52 PM

I'm with Mr. McCleary - just what is the theory of liability under which the State/University is liable? Short of permitting students to defend themselves (!!!there's a thought!!!) what duty to the students or their families did the school violate?

I don't see it, I'm afraid.

AMB | June 17, 2008 2:01 PM

The theory of public relations. This would have been a disaster of a case for the university if it had gone to court.

RobertG | June 17, 2008 2:26 PM

"do not understand the liability theory. How was the university negligent??? There is no duty to protect students"

And that is the question to be answered. One of the arguments of the gun banners, in this case the University, is that you do not need a gun as they will protect you. How it plays out we do not know. But I would not want a locomotive in my drive unless it was on top of a gun grabber.

Bill | June 17, 2008 3:34 PM

I think the theory of liability is that, unlike between the police and the general public, there was a special relationship of some sort between the students and the University, creating some degree of duty of care for the University.

The students were effectively in the University's "care", for lack of a better word right now.

Not saying I agree with that theory, just saying I think that's the basic gist. That and PR, as others have said.

It sounds horribly cold when you say it, but I also never understood the payments to the people injured and families of people killed in the WTC on 9/11. These are folks who just went to work like any other day and just happened to work in a building that the terrorists chose to hit. So for this the government pays their families hundreds of thousands of dollars? It's absolutely tragic, but I don't understand the theory that if you get killed while sitting at your desk by a terrorist-piloted plane, you get a check from the government. What if someone was on their way in to work at the WTC that morning and got hit by a bus as they stepped off the curb to cross the street, right in front of the door to the building? Because they didn't die in the right way, they get nothing from the gov.

Letalis Maximus, Esq. | June 17, 2008 8:06 PM

The WTC payments were 1) simply a move by the government to save the NY Transit Authority, the airlines, the airport authorities, and (maybe) their insurance carriers from bankruptcy, 2) a way to give the victims something in case the courts did in fact rule that the "act of terrorism" exceptions to the insurance policies saved the insurance companies from having to pay up, and 3) a way to insure some recovery for the victims after all the involved companies declared bankruptcy.

All in all, it was a reasonable political solution to a horrible political/legal problem.

Ken | June 18, 2008 7:09 AM

While I tend to agree that this was primarily a public relations move to save face, the existence of a special relationship between the university and students requiring protection is one that universities have advocated to justify many of their policies. While its use has significantly declined significantly since the 60's, the idea of in loco parentis has been used to impose curfews and other regulations justified as ways to protect students (usually from themselves).

straightarrow | June 18, 2008 8:32 AM

This is nothing but making a profit off the death of one's child. While the university should be held accountable for their policy demanding defenselessness for its students, this is not accountability. This is a fee paid to the survivors for permission to continue this deadly policy.

A parent who truly cared about his child would insist that the policy be changed and accept nothing less than that for his silence. Certainly not money.

David M. McCleary | June 18, 2008 9:47 AM

for what its worht here is what I think about the WTC settlement.

"[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

-- James Madison (speech in the House of Representatives, 10 January 1794)

Reference: Elliot's Debates,

David M. McCleary | June 18, 2008 9:48 AM

For what its worth here is what I think about the WTC settlement.

"[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government."

-- James Madison (speech in the House of Representatives, 10 January 1794)

Reference: Elliot's Debates,

Tom | June 18, 2008 6:46 PM

I think it's a good thing to compensate the family's in some way for their loss, but is not something that has to be done. Can the family's of the Columbine tragedy claim it's the inability of the school to let minors carry firearms to protect themselves....no. Think about this, How can a hundred thousand innocent victims from one of our cities be compensated if a dirty bomb goes off by the hands of a foreign terrorist?