LIMITATION OF LIABILITY.

Thinking judge

Here is a typical “limitation of liability” in a user agreement.

In no event will the Operator be liable to any person for any indirect, incidental, special, punitive, cover or consequential damages (including, without limitation, damages for lost profits, revenue, sales, goodwill, use of content, impact on business, business interruption, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business opportunity) however caused, under any theory of liability, including, without limitation, contract, tort, warranty, breach of statutory duty, negligence or otherwise, even if the liable party has been advised as to the possibility of such damages or could have foreseen such damages.

Now, remember that Dr. Boli’s doctorate of laws was conferred honoris causa, and furthermore not by Americans, so he does not understand American law, and is willing to be instructed by the lawyers among his readers.

The obvious meaning of the clause is this: No matter how careless I am, and even if you told me I was being careless and would probably hurt you, I am not liable for any damages I cause to you, under any legal theory known to man.

The agreement is one to which you agree simply by using the service: “By accessing and using the Website and Services you agree to be bound by this Agreement.” Many of these “agreements” run over twenty thousand words. By using the service, you have agreed that you have read the agreement, but you did not.

It seems to Dr. Boli that there are three possibilities here:

1. This “limitation of liability” is valid, and therefore all the personal-injury attorneys and other liability lawyers in the world will do you no good against anyone who has copied and pasted this clause into a user agreement to which you agreed simply by existing; and soon there will be no damages awarded to anyone, and all those contingency-fee attorneys who advertise on billboards will starve.

2. This “limitation of liability” will not stand up in court if in fact the liable party knew or should have known that the conduct in question was likely to cause damage, and the lawyer who put those words in there and told his client “this will protect you” was lying.

3. An American lawyer is something between a faith healer and a witch doctor, someone who tries to convince himself that his rituals and incantations are doing some good, even though his senses perceive only a puff of blue smoke and a foul odor.

These are the three possibilities that occur to Dr. Boli when he reads a “limitation of liability” like this one. But Dr. Boli would be interested in hearing from an American lawyer who can explain the current state of the law.

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ASK DR. BOLI.

Man and woman at window

This image does not have a caption yet. It will be published with the correct caption as soon as a thorough search of the Akashic Records has been made.

On the subject of “How Modern Science Is Making Life Better,” our correspondent “KevinT” writes, “I would be greatly interested in a blog post about the research methodology the good Doctor uses to find these amusing images. And the talents he applies to the explicatory text…”

The research methodology is probably not as arcane as our correspondent thinks it is. Every once in a while, it is an amusing pastime to look through the recent additions to the scanned publications in the Internet Archive—filtering out anything published later than 95 years ago. Any magazine opened at random will probably provide a few illustrations. They must be cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday best to be published here, but that is what the GIMP is for.

As for the explicatory text, that is a more complex endeavor. Many of the captions under these images are entirely incorrect as they are found, but the correct versions can be discovered by the methods explained more than a century ago by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. He tells us that “at a certain high stage of knowledge, man can even penetrate to the everlasting sources that underlie the passing things of time.… Those who have learnt to read such a living script can look back into a far more distant past than that which external history depicts—and they can also, by direct spiritual perception, describe those matters which history relates, in a far more trustworthy manner than is possible by the latter.” This is called reading the Akashic Records, and, as Dr. Steiner patiently elucidates, it is completely different from making stuff up.

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