Sorry, not right, at least not in legal terms. Intent is probably the most critical factor in liability.

I'm sensing a confusion here between criminal and civil liability. Criminal liability requires intent (and since I haven't worked in criminal law since law school nearly 20 years ago, I'll stop there).

Civil liability generally only requires negligence. Taking Typo's car crash example, you could be civilly liable but not criminally liable. If that's the case, you'd have to compensate the person you hit, but you wouldn't have to do jail time or pay a fine to the government.

Pete - what about where there is no negligence. My example where a pedestrian steps out from between two parked cars, no way you could have seen him in time to stop. If there is proof that the pedestrian rather than the driver was negligent - there was nothing the driver could have reasonably done to nont hit the pedestrian - is there still civil liability?

Sorry, not right, at least not in legal terms. Intent is probably the most critical factor in liability.

I'm sensing a confusion here between criminal and civil liability. Criminal liability requires intent (and since I haven't worked in criminal law since law school nearly 20 years ago, I'll stop there).

I assumed lisah was talking about criminal liability only since she said

but it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility for having committed the illegal act!

and we're talking about the current Enron proceeding.

eh I was talking generally and generally out of my ass (which is fine but not very knowledgeable about law).

Typo, some fault is usually required for civil liability. If the pedestrian was the only one negligent, the driver shouldn't be liable.

Still tortured by GA whitefont.

Today I had 2 meetings already. Now down time.

My dinner last night became a semi-business dinner. And it lasted 2.5 hours. I was exhausted by the time I got to bed. That is too long for dinner with not friends.

"Stature?" Petrocelli asked incredulously. "He's antisocial! He loved building the business. He didn't like running the business and he wasn't very good at it. He made a lot of mistakes (but) a mistake is not a crime."

If you'd have been there / If you'd have seen it / how could you tell him that he was wrong?

If a sleazebag rips off his customers when no one's around, does he still make money?

The #1 threat is still bears:

Bears killed and ate a monkey in a Dutch zoo in front of horrified visitors, witnesses and the zoo said Monday. In the incident Sunday at the Beekse Bergen Safari Park, several Sloth bears chased the Barbary macaque into an electric fence, where it was stunned.

It recovered and fled onto a wooden structure, where one bear pursued and mauled it to death.

The park confirmed the killing in a statement, saying: "In an area where Sloth bears, great apes and Barbary macaques have coexisted peacefully for a long time, the harmony was temporarily disturbed during opening hours on Sunday."

Ignoring attempts by keepers to distract it, the bear climbed onto a horizontal pole, and, standing stretched on two legs, "used its sharp canines to pull the macaque, which was shrieking and resisting, from its perch."

The bear then brought the animal to a concrete den, where three bears ate it.

And lo, the stress-induced migraine has come upon me.

I'm required to deal with a fair amount of volatile situations because I don't lose my cool. Well, up to a point, it's more water off this duck's back than for any of my co-workers. And beyond that point, it's just that I don't show it when people are being frustratingly clueless. Post-concussion, that hurts.

Colbert will be on that bear story like brown on organic rice!

Speaking of such things, was it just me, or did the "cranky old guy on the street" actor on The Daily Show last night quite look like what you'd expect Stewart's father to look like?