Super Lawyers
William C. Altreuter
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Tuesday, January 05, 2021

 People assume that I’m a tort lawyer because I love slapstick, and it’s true that the stories are part of why I enjoy this work, but there’s more to it than that. It’s said that journalism is the first draft of history, and I think something like that can be said about the way tort jurisprudence develops: in many ways the manner in which social disruptions are first addressed in our system is through the adjudication of harm.
One of the expressions we use nowadays is that something is “the new normal”. I think that’s premature: we don’t know yet what normal is going to look like because we are still very much in a state of disruption. Even so, we are trying to devise ways of going about life in ways that sort of resemble the way things were before this pandemic, and one of the systems that’s being devised is a revisiting of the way risk is allocated in the workplace and beyond.
COVID-19 is disruptive and disorienting because we really don’t have a model for something like this. It is different from a war, or other disaster because it is universal and invisible. There feels like there is an approach/avoidance conflict to everything in our lives. We have to go to the grocery, we need to work to pay for groceries, and we need to address the risks that make the mundane perilous. In doing this we need to determine if new systems are necessary- or if the political and cultural agendas that we’ve been wresting with in the Before Times are sufficient today.


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