To South Carolina bars and their advocates, the answer to rising alcohol legal responsibility insurance coverage charges that could be driving a few of them out of enterprise is clear: Scale back their legal responsibility. That’s: Make it more durable for victims of drunk drivers to carry bars answerable for the deaths and accidents they contribute to at any time when they overserve inebriated clients who go on to kill or injure harmless victims.
Their go-to resolution is to eradicate a regulation referred to as “joint and a number of other” legal responsibility, which permits people who find themselves discovered liable in a lawsuit to get caught with greater than their share of the damages if different defendants can’t pay. It appears like an unfair coverage — till you understand that defendants assigned lower than 50% of the blame can solely be topic to paying greater than their share of damages once they present alcohol or unlawful medication to the motive force or have interaction in different conduct that’s “willful, wanton, reckless, grossly negligent, or intentional.”
When bar house owners and their allies in different lawsuit-prone industries received pushback, they got here up with the concept of getting state authorities write their insurance coverage insurance policies — and subsidize them by state liquor taxes. Which is an astounding concept in such a free-market-loving state.
The newest concept, trotted out earlier this month, is to say a bar proprietor can’t be held answerable for the habits of a drunken buyer until he “knew or ought to have recognized that the person was visibly intoxicated on the time of the sale, service, or furnishing of the alcohol” and that “the person’s intoxication was a proximate explanation for bodily harm, dying, or property injury to the third get together.”
That sounds fairly cheap — and the second half is. However the first half is extra sophisticated. Apart from the slippery nature of “visibly intoxicated,” there’s the overly suave wording in regards to the look of the drinker “on the time of sale.”
Contemplate this real-life state of affairs, from a S.C. lawsuit: A buyer walks right into a bar and orders 4 beers abruptly, and downs all 4 himself in 45 minutes. Then he staggers out and kills somebody. The bar performed a big function within the sufferer’s dying, however the buyer wasn’t “visibly intoxicated” when the bar profited by promoting him the 4 beers without delay, so underneath S.1048 it couldn’t be held liable. Which is definitely not cheap.
These should not the one choices. There are a number of adjustments that could possibly be made to state regulation that would scale back alcohol legal responsibility insurance coverage prices for many bars with out decreasing bars’ legal responsibility when their inebriated clients exit and injure or kill folks.
The obvious is to require the state Insurance coverage Division to manage liquor legal responsibility insurance coverage charges, the identical approach it regulates different insurance coverage charges. In the event you get a bunch of rushing tickets, your auto insurance coverage coverage goes to price greater than the coverage of somebody with a spotless document. However underneath present regulation, there’s no rhyme or motive to why a four-star restaurant that’s by no means overserved anyone pays the identical premium because the dive bar that has been repeatedly sued. S.1050 would change that, bringing some safety to accountable bars and eating places.
The Legislature may require coaching for bar house owners and their employees who serve alcohol, which some companies do voluntarily and others have fought tooth-and-nail on the Statehouse. If servers are educated in easy methods to spot people who find themselves consuming an excessive amount of, they’ll reduce them off, even perhaps discuss them into getting a protected journey residence, and scale back the variety of harmless folks they kill — which in flip will scale back the sum of money insurers pay out in legal responsibility claims.
The Legislature may additionally improve the penalties for drunken driving — and eradicate the numerous straightforward outs to the penalties, and the underlying regulation — which has helped different states produce a lot decrease alcohol-death charges than our state has.
It additionally may create a dram store regulation, which makes it against the law to serve alcohol to somebody who’s intoxicated. That would not preclude lawsuits when clients who’re overserved injure or kill, but it surely ought to reduce down on these, as a result of a severe prison penalty would give bar house owners and servers extra incentive to tighten up their insurance policies.
Higher nonetheless, the Legislature may enact all of those adjustments to scale back the carnage of DUI — relatively than specializing in decreasing the value the enablers need to pay when that carnage happens.
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