Friday, August 09, 2024
New York's experiment with the Child Victims Act is a good example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. There are a lot of bad decisions coming out of it, and I am hard-pressed to see what good has resulted. To the extent that the victims are being compensated monetarily it is by way of settlements which, for the most part, are substantially smaller than gets reported, because the settlements are not reported. The "empty chair" verdicts are meaningless. It's a good example of "When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." The legislature believed that access to the tort system was the answer to a serious social problem, and as a result the courts are flooded with years and decades-old cases in which witnesses are mostly dead or unavailable, documents and other evidence no longer exists, and the remedy- money damages- is as best elusive. The culpable institutions and their insurers are faced with expenses that were never anticipated and are proving to be existential.
None of this exculpates the culpable, and it is important that the shocking reality of the extent the abuse that society ignored or enabled has been exposed, but when the dust finally settles what we will be left with is a body of jurisprudence that has been twisted and distorted in ways I can't even imagine.
