. . . because if you entrust somebody with authority to act for you, you are responsible for what he does.

And from the point of view of the insurer (assuming the insurer didn’t have standard policy clauses excluding coverage in this kind of case), because you accepted a premium to defend and indemnify your insured against this kind of risk.

According to the New York article the teacher in question was hired by the school on the recommendation of a donor who at that time was already a convicted pedophiliac. So I’m not sure it’s the most useful portrayal of the facts to describe the school as unlucky in one of their hiring decisions.

The article also provides rather a lot of detail that makes it seem that, if teachers and administrators were ignorant of what was going on, they were willfully so. For example: one teacher had a classroom opposite the abuser’s bedroom (recall that this was a boarding school located in a former mansion). According to Lessig, there were a number of occasions on which this teacher saw him (Lessig)leaving the abuser’s bedroom in the morning.

But I’m still at a loss as to why money should go from the insurance to the kid.

Well, call me a crazy idealist, but if an insurance company proffers policies that cover the expenses of sexual abuse, then one would like to make it well worth their while to keep some oversight over their clients.

I wish I could say something like “malpractice insurance weeds out bad doctors, same thing” but alas, that’s not true. Sigh. But that’s the theory, anyway, and it sure seems like a better idea than to task some harried headmaster with the problem, and punish a single school because they were the ones unlucky enough to hire Mr. Creep.

Actually, Cornyn was talking about attacks that had already happened, and arguing that said attacks were unfortunate, but in a sense understandable. Which makes Oskar Shapley’s “analogy” even stupider than it might appear.

Er, yeah. Cornyn talked about illegal actions like violently beating people up, and I talked about legal actions, like arguing your case before the courts.

Alas, Kieran did not write about a “desire to sue the institution into bankruptcy”, he wrote about arson.

“Raze” does not mean “burn.” You might also consider the difference between using the word metaphorically in the context of a legal case and saying that people will literally be attacked.

Where I’d really like the analogy to work, of course, is an equivalence between the amount of media attention John Cornyn can command for his remarks and the amount I can generate for mine. That would be neat.

Note: I’m not sure of the argument above. But I do agree that our system of ‘when something bad happens, take money from the nearest deep pocket’ is morally/structurally odd.
Steve

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) : “I don’t know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that’s been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in – engage in violence.”

Kieran:

“I don’t know about the legal merits, of course, but on the basis of their past experiences, together with the evasions and blame-the-victim insinuations from the school’s President and its chief lawyer, it’s easy to see how the litigants’ could have a desire to raze the institution to the ground.”

Yes, I understand that this is not the same issue and the analogy is not pefect. They never are. On the one hand threats against judges, on the other a lawsuit.

Alas, Kieran did not write about a “desire to sue the institution into bankruptcy”, he wrote about arson.

Comments?