Melvin Watt: “sometimes we get lost in the technicalities of these legal bills. But we should start with the proposition that our…”

“sometimes we get lost in the technicalities of these legal bills. But we should start with the proposition that our liability laws in this country actually reflect the values of our country that personal responsibility and corporate responsibility are at the top of what we value in this country. So a question of who has responsibility for paying for a person's injuries boils down to a question of who has responsibility for causing those injuries. That is the whole basis of our liability law in this country. In this case, what this bill does is it says that, even if a manufacturer is responsible for the injury of a worker and the worker has absolutely no responsibility after 18 years, that worker is just dead out of luck. That is what this bill says. Regardless of how egregious the conduct in designing the equipment is of the manufacturer, how reckless they are, we are going to shift the responsibility for paying for the injury to an innocent party. That is completely contrary to our whole concept in this country of personal and corporate responsibility. That is the first objection I have to this bill.…”