![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
"The Cold Equations" -- who gets sued?
Nov. 3rd, 2013 09:05 pm(Another comment at Kalimac's entry on "The Cold Equations", which grew to independent size.)
In our legal system, everybody would try to sue everybody. In one legal system that might be inferred from the distinction in the preface ("a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ "), it might sort out something like this:
1) EDS ship designers - subject to 'Frontier Law'
2) EDS regulation writers - subject to 'Frontier Law'
3) EDS pilot - subject to 'Frontier Law'
4) Big ship carrying passengers - subject to laws more like ours
Under such a system, the big ship's owners or managers could be successfully sued by both the girl's family and EDS, for lack of a good security barrier between passenger area and EDS area.
The pilot could complain to the regulation writers, who could complain to the designers. All three EDS parties would be protected by Frontier Law, as doing the best they could for emergency missions with limited resources: not enough time to spare for precautions against such a fluke event.
ETA: I think probabilitly and risk/benefit may be the key difference here. Whoever chose to have that big ship carrying both tourists and critical EDS equipment, had a one-time responsibility of making an effective barrier* to keep the tourists out of the danger area -- for many reasons. Otherwise, there's a high probability that some tourists would eventually wander in, causing various problems.
Otoh, the specific problem of an innocent stowaway in some small EDS craft had a much lower probability; thus it would not have made sense for EDS to engineer the whole fleet to accomodate stowaways.
As for the pilot 'scanning' for stowaways who might have snuck in after the normal pre-flight inventory -- presumably scanning by opening all the closets and looking under the bunk, if any -- again that's a very unlikely danger to spend time on.
ETA 2. *Actually, as with us, passengers would normally be confined to a safe area -- not allowed to get into the engine rooms or any other utilitarian areas.
In our legal system, everybody would try to sue everybody. In one legal system that might be inferred from the distinction in the preface ("a frontier is not always easy to recognize. It may lie on the other side of a simple door marked ‘No admittance’ "), it might sort out something like this:
1) EDS ship designers - subject to 'Frontier Law'
2) EDS regulation writers - subject to 'Frontier Law'
3) EDS pilot - subject to 'Frontier Law'
4) Big ship carrying passengers - subject to laws more like ours
Under such a system, the big ship's owners or managers could be successfully sued by both the girl's family and EDS, for lack of a good security barrier between passenger area and EDS area.
The pilot could complain to the regulation writers, who could complain to the designers. All three EDS parties would be protected by Frontier Law, as doing the best they could for emergency missions with limited resources: not enough time to spare for precautions against such a fluke event.
ETA: I think probabilitly and risk/benefit may be the key difference here. Whoever chose to have that big ship carrying both tourists and critical EDS equipment, had a one-time responsibility of making an effective barrier* to keep the tourists out of the danger area -- for many reasons. Otherwise, there's a high probability that some tourists would eventually wander in, causing various problems.
Otoh, the specific problem of an innocent stowaway in some small EDS craft had a much lower probability; thus it would not have made sense for EDS to engineer the whole fleet to accomodate stowaways.
As for the pilot 'scanning' for stowaways who might have snuck in after the normal pre-flight inventory -- presumably scanning by opening all the closets and looking under the bunk, if any -- again that's a very unlikely danger to spend time on.
ETA 2. *Actually, as with us, passengers would normally be confined to a safe area -- not allowed to get into the engine rooms or any other utilitarian areas.
