Click it or Ticket, but Don't Admit It? How Unrestrained Drivers and Passengers Take Us for a Ride
| Publication year | 2022 |
Click It or Ticket, But Don't Admit It? How Unrestrained Drivers and Passengers Take Us for a Ride
E.R. Wright
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While the COVID-19 crisis has forced societies and governments to confront new challenges and answer new questions, it has also renewed and reignited longstanding debates about the extent of individuals' obligations to each other.1 In particular, the American body politic is once again embroiled in conflict over the reach of an individual's personal choices and the extent to which consideration of the potentially harmful effects of our choices on others should shape individual behaviors.2 Today, this fight centers on public health measures intended to reduce the spread and severity of COVID-19, such as masking, distancing, and vaccination.3 Debates rage over where the freedom of individual choice—a nearly-sacred tenant of the gospel of American exceptionalism—intersects with and must yield to the interests of others. Governments at all levels have largely responded to the current crisis with ad hoc improvisation and strained efforts to balance public health imperatives against real and imagined threats to individual liberty.
These clumsy attempts include carving out a creative range of exemptions to masking, testing, and vaccine requirements, as well as draping businesses with blanket immunity shields that protect against
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liability even for grossly negligent conduct.4 Each of these measures has met ferocious opposition from one camp or another, and elected and aspiring public officials have weaponized the COVID-19 crisis to the point that outbreaks of fights at local school board meetings regularly make national news.5
While the pandemic created too many unprecedented challenges, the debate over the line between public safety and personal choice is anything but new.6 A few decades ago, that debate manifested around state laws mandating seatbelt use by drivers and occupants of motor vehicles.7 Then, as now, states facing an epidemic of traffic injuries and fatalities struggled to persuade a reluctant population to take the basic measure of buckling up.8 Then, as now, the messy politics of legislating public safety resulted in the imposition of mandates coupled with broad liability shields.9
It remains far too early to understand or appreciate the long-term impacts of the current iteration of legislative attempts to protect the public in the face of vocal opposition. However, states can learn from the seatbelt debate that trading blanket immunity for safety mandates can create problems that vex the judicial branch even long after societal and technological changes have minimized the utility of such liability shields.
This Article examines one example of the immunity grants that legislative bodies too often bake into laws passed to address public safety emergencies: prohibition of the seatbelt defense. The Article begins by explaining the theory behind the defense and tracing the history of the passage of seatbelt mandate laws that incorporate prohibition of the defense.10 It then illustrates scenarios in which
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banning the defense creates breakdowns of fundamental tort principles and undermines justice. Next, the Article discusses the original justifications offered by opponents of the seatbelt defense and highlights the ways behavioral and technological changes have rendered those justifications empty. Finally, the Article argues that piecemeal, limited exemptions to bans on the seatbelt defense are ineffective and therefore, the Article advocates for full reinstatement of the seatbelt defense.
Simply, the seatbelt defense is the use of a vehicle occupant's failure to wear a seatbelt as a defense in a tort action.11 The defense takes multiple forms, each presenting a straightforward application of the basic principles of fairness underlying tort law. This Section examines several applications of the seatbelt defense. While it does not purport to offer an exhaustive review of potential applications for the defense, this Section illustrates the most common—and most commonsense—applications for the seatbelt defense in modern tort law.
A. Contributory and Comparative Negligence
It is not difficult to imagine how often a collision plaintiff's failure to wear a seatbelt could amount to contributory negligence, particularly in a simple two-car, two-person collision case. If a defendant presents evidence that the plaintiff acted negligently by failing to buckle up, and that negligence was a cause that contributed to the plaintiff's damages, our most basic understanding of tort law as a vehicle to compensate the innocent plaintiff demands at least a reduction in the plaintiff's award.12
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American tort law first recognized the concept of contributory negligence in 1824, when Massachusetts adopted the defense because a plaintiff should not recover "unless . . . he used ordinary care; for without that, it is by no means certain that he himself was not the cause of his own injury."13 American jurisdictions quickly followed Massachusetts' lead and adopted contributory negligence, relying on Lord Ellenborough's famous declaration that, "[a] party is not to cast himself upon an obstruction which has been made by the fault of another, and avail[s] himself of it, if he do[es] not himself use common and ordinary caution to be in the right."14 Modern shifts toward more forgiving standards of comparative negligence and apportioned fault still rely on the principle that the "idea of fairness . . . calls on tort law to take account of the plaintiff's contributory negligence in ascertaining the liability of a negligent defendant[.]"15 These basic tenets of tort law require juries to consider whether a plaintiff's failure to wear a seatbelt breached the duty to exercise ordinary care and whether such breach caused or contributed to the plaintiff's injuries.
1. Failure to Wear a Seatbelt is Negligent Conduct
Negligence law is rooted in objective reasoning, and whether certain conduct is negligent depends on jurors' conceptions of the general "reasonable person."16 In general, however, modern tort law applies a loose formula to determine whether a party exercised reasonable care.17 Learned Hand's famous formula holds that the duty of reasonable care depends upon the relationship between the likelihood of harm, the gravity of potential harm, and the burden of taking steps to prevent or mitigate the harm.18 Where the likelihood or gravity of potential harm
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increases, the duty to take preventive or mitigative measures increases proportionally, especially if the burden of taking such measures is low.19 Conversely, where the burden to prevent harm is high, tort law tolerates a higher likelihood and greater gravity of potential harm.20
Applying these general principles to collision cases, failure to wear a seatbelt unquestioningly amounts to negligent conduct.21 Refusing to wear a belt dramatically increases the likelihood and gravity of potential injuries, and the burden of belting is negligible.22 Accordingly, where a plaintiff's injuries were actually or proximately caused by their own failure to take reasonable care by buckling up, the seatbelt defense should apply to prevent a plaintiff from profiting from their own negligence.
a. Failure to Buckle Up Increases Potential for and Degree of Injury
The life-saving benefits of wearing a seatbelt are commonly known.23 Unrestrained vehicle occupants are both more likely than belted occupants to suffer injuries in a collision and more likely to suffer more severe injuries than their belted counterparts.24 Unbelted occupants are more likely than their belted counterparts to suffer injuries disproportionate to the force of impact.25 A light tap on the rear end of a vehicle can send an unrestrained driver or front-seat passenger into the steering wheel or through the windshield, causing injuries—or more severe injuries—where a restrained driver would suffer no or only mild injuries.26 Moreover, an unrestrained occupant's body is subject to the full brunt of forces of movement a collision creates, increasing the likeliness and severity of spine and soft tissue injuries.27 In general, a vehicle occupant who wears a seatbelt is 45% less likely to suffer fatal
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injuries and 50% less likely to suffer severe injuries in a collision than an unrestrained occupant.28
Plainly, refusing to wear an available safety belt increases the likelihood that the plaintiff will suffer harm as well as the degree of harm the plaintiff is likely to suffer. Because the burden of wearing a safety belt is negligible, especially weighed against the increased risk and gravity of harm, failing to wear an available seatbelt is negligent conduct.
b. Burden of Belting is Negligible
Especially compared to the degree of risk buckling up prevents, the burden of wearing a seatbelt is negligible. Since 1968, all new motor vehicles manufactured and sold in the United States have been required to incorporate seatbelts.29 As a result, nearly all passenger cars and trucks on American roads are equipped with seatbelts. Buckling up therefore imposes no additional cost on drivers or purchasers of passenger vehicles.
Additionally, since safety belts were introduced in vehicles, seatbelt comfort has improved steadily. Product designers now take account of differences in body shapes and sizes, and most safety belt systems feature multi-point adjustability to make buckling up more comfortable than ever. Even while seatbelts have become more comfortable, accessories advertised to make vehicle occupants even more comfortable are widely available. Simply, buckling up does not create discomfort sufficient to meaningfully burden a vehicle occupant.
While belted occupants sometimes suffer...
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