“Natural hazards can have devastating impacts on communities.” Professor Gardoni states in lecture. He goes on to explain how natural hazards create losses for communities and individuals. These losses can accumulate to billions of dollars. The central issue is Tort Law: who should bear the costs of a disaster, the victims, the community, or the government? Risk is defined as two dimensions: the probability of occurrence and the associated consequences of a set of hazardous scenarios. Looking at a scale of risk the higher ranked is determined by how large the consequences are due to greater probability. For example indivduals who live in California have a greater scale of risk because those indivduals live on land with high frequency of earthquakes. …show more content…
Is it their fault because they chose to live on a location where earthquakes occur frequently? Indivdiauls who have a larger income can offord safely structured homes or buildings to prevent damanges when a natural hazard occurs. This decressases their risk on the scale because the probability of consequences isn’t large anymore. But what about the individuals in low income who can’t afford to invest money into how safe the structure they live in is built. Those individuals can’t be put to blame because they are in low in come and most of the time has no knowledge about how safety a structured was built. The engineers who made the buildings or homes how the structure was made don’t tell individuals in low in come. For example engineers don’t enclose they used triangular beams in order to have a more secure structure. Individuals in low income don’t have many options when talking about natural hazard damages. When natural hazards do occur …show more content…
Comparisons require communities to make judgments about the relative importance of different kinds of consequences and the kind of priority that will placed on achieving fairness in the distribution of risks.” (P. 1208) Gardoni and Murphy go on to explain communities are force to decide which risks are exposed to members of the community. Lower income parts of the community don’t have the resources to develop safety. The individuals who can afford safety as a priority live together on the opposite side of the community than those living in poverty. It’s important for individuals to come together as a community and help one another out, especially in situations when natural hazards have occurred. Distributing fairness in the community is easier said then done especially when the members who have the power to control the community in deciding what gets fund are the members in the community who are wealthy and aren’t living in poverty. How can the low income members of the community get funds to build safety as a priority when members at the top of the community never see the conditions the low income members live in. To have communities distribute fairly funds so all members have the same risk when a natural hazard occurs their needs to be awareness to the issue. Many members in the community aren’t educated on the risk they
A risk classification is how much risk you are in when you buy insurance. For example if you were to buy health insurance, but you have a heart condition your insurance will cost a lot more. The insurance company can determine this in many different ways, for health insurance you will typically take a physical before you get insured. Another situation where risk comes to play in insurance would be car
Jan Schlichtmann, is the head of a small firm of personal injury attorneys, who is also known to be a successful lawyer in Boston. This small firm only takes on cases they believe they can win. Their clients are for the most part too poor to pay legal fees. Schlichtmann 's firm pays for the legal costs. In which they hope they can gain a portion of an eventual settlement.
Catastrophes impact large areas, crossing regional and often, state jurisdictional boundaries, and will require m...
An activity that we participate in on a daily basis is belonging and being part of a community. We live in a world where associating and identifying ourselves with certain groups is how we share common interests, and we are responsible for facing whatever may come our way. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast the differences and similarities between the approaches seen from the Chicago Heat Wave and Buffalo Creek Flood. The main differences are historical groundwork, relationship to land, physical/social vulnerability, problematic development, choices we make and media coverage. Kleinberg and Erikson both offer a greater variety of what exactly a disaster or community consist of. Although, both have some overlapping themes and ideas, their methodological approaches and expectations of a community dealing with a disaster differ significantly.
Kahn, M. E. (2007). Environmental disasters as risk regulation catalysts? Journal of Risk & Uncertainty, 29.
A tort is a wrong. More precisely, a tort is a violation of a duty imposed by the civil law. When a person breaks one of those duties and injures another, it is a tort. The injury could be to a person or her property. In a tort case, it is up to the injured party to seek compensation. She must hire her own lawyer, who will file a lawsuit. Her lawyer must convince the court that the defendant breached some legal duty and ought to pay money damages to the plaintiff. A crime is an act so threatening that the government itself will prosecute whether the injured party wants the case to go forward. A district attorney, who is paid by the government, will bring the case to court seeking to send the defendant to prison. If there is a fine,
Tort reform is very controversial issue. From the plaintiff’s perspective, tort reforms seems to take liability away from places such as insurance companies and hospitals which could at times leave the plaintiff without defense. From the defendant’s perspective, tort reform provides a defense from extremely large punitive damage awards. There seems to be no median between the two. Neither side will be satisfied. With the help of affiliations such as the American Tort Reform Association and Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse, many businesses and corporations are working to change the current tort system to stop these high cash awards.
Tort law is a very prevalent aspect of conducting business and daily life in the twenty first century. According to the textbook, The Legal Environment of Business, tort law provides “remedies for the invasion of various protected interests.” (Cross & Miller, 2012) In this essay about tort law, I will talk about a tort case that has personally impacted me. To do so, I will provide a background of the event, apply facts of the case to applicable law, summarize lessons of the week as they relate to this case and provide a plausible argument for the parties involved.
A tort is wrongful interference against a person or property, other than breaches of contract, for which the courts can rectify through legal action. The reform effort is aimed at reducing the number of unnecessary lawsuits that burden the court system while still allowing injured parties compensation when they’ve been wronged. This latest effort at tort reform has given rise to the same spirited rhetoric that might be found in a courtroom.
Tort, one of the crucial subjects of study when analyzing common law jurisdictions. Tort, is an action which causes another person or party to suffer harm or loss []. The person who has committed a tortious act is called the tortfeasor while the person who suffered harm or loss from such act is called the injured party or the victim. Although crimes may be torts, torts may not be crimes [] simply because a tort may not have broken a law. In fact, one must understand that the key idea of tort is not to punish the tortfeasor(s) but rather to compensate the victim(s).
I am going to write this paper on tort reform, what it is and its overarching role in the documentary. Tort Reform is defined as “proposed changes in the civil justice system that aim to reduce the ability of victims to bring litigation or to reduce damages they can receive”. Another theme that I believe ties in really well with the idea of tort reform is the idea of how big of an influence money has in politics. Many people would agree that there are a lot of companies that would want tort reform so they don’t have to worry about losing millions of dollars.
The thought of social vulnerability arose most recently within the sermon on natural hazards and disasters. To date no one definition has been agreed upon. Similarly, multiple theories of social vulnerability exist (Weichselgartner 2001). Most work conducted so far focuses on empirical observation and conceptual models. Thus current social vulnerability research is a middle range theory and represents an attempt to understand the social conditions that transform a natural hazard (e.g. flood, earthquake, mass movements etc.) into a social disaster. The idea highlights two main themes:
1. What is the definition of an "ex post facto" law and why are they unfair? Ex post facto is a law that retroactively changes the lawful results of activities that were conferred, or connections that existed, before the authorization of the law. It is out of line since it might criminalize activities that were lawful when perpetrated; it might exasperate a wrongdoing by bringing it into a more extreme class than it was in when it was carried out; it might change the discipline recommended for a wrongdoing, as by including new punishments or broadening sentences; or it might modify the tenets of confirmation so as to make conviction for a wrongdoing likelier than it would have been the point at which the deed was carried out.
In the wake of natural disasters, the minorities of America are down the pecking order in the government’s list of priorities. Specifically seen in the African-American people, the government fails to provide speedy response time, supplies and other aid, as well as providing substantial compensation for the families devastated by disasters, which could have been preventable or deterred from causing more havoc. In many cases, the African-American people were exposed to poor living conditions, living in undesirable areas, and a lack of wealth, education, and preventative warnings of oncoming disasters. This can be seen in the cases of the 1900 great hurricane of Galveston, Texas and the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, but the greatest example of all is Hurricane Katrina of 2005, where the victims who were affected were disproportionally African-American.
Communities throughout the country and the world are susceptible to disasters. The environment and location of a community often predisposes a greater susceptibility to the type of disaster. For example Central Pennsylvania would not be susceptible to an avalanche however communities in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado would have increase vulnerability. Understanding the types of disaster for which the community is susceptible is essential for emergency preparedness (Nies & McEwen, 2011). All communities are susceptible to man-made disasters; terrorism, fires, and mass transit accidents and emergency preparedness are essential. The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) is responsible for disaster planning.