LuckyDan
Sublime
Here's the way it works. With drawing money out of a business that serves the public, comes responsibility as well. A business owner is, to some extent and under certain circumstances, responsible for what happens on his business premises. If you want to look at it this way, a bartender who turns a drunk loose on the highway is in the same position as a landlord who maintains a dangerous condition on his premises. Both are negligent and both are held financially responsible when an innocent person is hurt because of their negligence.
That is a very brief explanation of tort liability in the situation under discussion here - the full analysis of it is a lot more complicated, but that's the basic setup.
Briefly stated: People who realize profit from some type of operation must also assume responsibility for harm that comes to others from their running of that operation.
You may not like or agree with that, but that's the way it is.
It's not at all complicated, really. I was just curious why you added in the profit thing as making even more sense, as if a party-thrower who allows his guests to leave his house drunk is somehow less negligent.
Thanks for the reply.
Well, we didn't get into a discussion of duty, foreseeability or proximate cause which, I guarantee you, ARE "all that complicated, really."
The reason I mentioned the "profit" end of it is, that dram shop laws generally apply only to commercial establishments that sell booze - not to a party-thrower in his own home. Both the party-thrower and the bartender could well be equally negligent in turning a drunk loose on the highway, but the dram shop laws only apply to the bartender. However, I think party-throwers have also been successfully sued in this situation on the theory of general negligence, rather than under any specific statute.
Well, I ain't much for fancy book learnin', and I don't know dram shop law, but I don't think is involves a duty owed by a vendor, unless it is a duty to sober a drunk up or give him a place to crash till he can get up and walk away.
If Doyle was drunk when he walked into Smiles, he should have been bounced. that would seem to place proximate cause on him for being intoxicated in public.
If, after being served, he was so drunk he was passing out, the vendor should have known that he couldn't get himself safely home without a good case of Drunk's Luck. And if he was bounced anywhere near a freakin' highway that he could just stumble onto, trouble was foreseeable.
I wonder tho how sympathetic a jury his brother is going to get. He was, after all, getting souced in what I assume is a strip club.