A Look at the Legal Environment for Driverless Vehicles (2016) / Chapter Skim
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4produce in the insurance market. Section VII turns to the privacy and security implications of driverless vehicles and the imperative of building both security and privacy into driverless vehicles.
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5condition,"11 made the masters and owners of boats jointly and severely liable for damages occasioned by their failure to maintain their equipment in good condition,12 and specified that engaging in steamboat racing represented a misdemeanor.13 The federal government adopted an even more comprehensive approach toward the bursting-boiler problem, enacting a statute that combined a licensing regime with the prospect of criminal and civil liability. Proposals to regulate steamboat boilers had circulated in Congress as early as 1824, but it took 14 years for a law to pass.14 The statute that emerged in 1838, shortly after the Moselle disaster, required semiannual inspections of a steamboat's boilers and annual inspections of the rest of the boat, to be performed by an inspector appointed by the local district court.15 Only steamboats that passed this inspection would receive the license required for operation of the vessel.16 The law also demanded that steamboats have "a competent number of experienced and skillful engineers" on board.17 Another provision within this law specified that it would be regarded as criminal manslaughter when a steamboat employee's "misconduct, negligence, or inattention" caused a loss of "the life or lives of any person or persons on board."18 Finally, the statute provided that in civil lawsuits against steamboat proprietors alleging injuries to persons or property from a steamboat accident, the bursting of a boiler or the escape of steam from a boiler would be regarded as prima facie (sufficient)
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6railroad management and employees, as opposed to flaws endemic in railroad operations.30 A spate of accidents in the 1850s31 placed railroad dangers in sharper focus. An April 1852 editorial in the American Railroad Journal observed that "‘accidents' are becoming so alarmingly frequent, they should receive attention for the purpose of devising some way of preventing them, if for no other."32 The editors continued: The only way to prevent accidents, is to make it for the interest of railroad companies that they should NOT happen; to make the penalty so great, that freedom from them shall be necessary for economy's sake.
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7impose upon railroad companies a high, if not absolute standard of care.40 As railroad historian James Ely has observed, "Liability for injury to passengers was based on negligence, but the happening of an accident raised a prima facie presumption of fault by the carrier. The burden of proof was then placed on the company to demonstrate its freedom from blame."41 Some states also recognized new types of claims for the benefit of deceased passengers' next of kin, taking the first step toward modern "wrongful death" laws.42 A Massachusetts law of this type, enacted in 1840, allowed a widow or other heir to recover between $500 and $5,000 when the negligence or recklessness of a proprietor or employee of a railroad, steamboat, stagecoach, or other common carrier led to the death of a passenger.43 Railroad employees were less fortunate,44 as their employers could invoke any or all of three potent defenses to their tort lawsuits -- contributory negligence, assumption of the risk, and the "fellow servant" rule.45 The first of these doctrines barred recovery if the plaintiff 's own negligence contributed to his injury; the second defeated a claim when the plaintiff was regarded as having voluntarily exposed himself to a known risk of harm; and the third exonerated the employer when the plaintiff 's injury was attributable to the fault of a coworker.46 The doctrines of contributory negligence and assumption of the risk predated railroads.
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8letters that were sealed in envelopes, the contents of messages sent over telegraph wires had to be disclosed to intermediaries. Fears that these middlemen might misuse the information they obtained, or that interlopers might eavesdrop on transmissions or engage in "wiretapping," led states to adopt criminal laws to deter this sort of unwelcome intermeddling.
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9down.70 The city began to take down hazardous wires the very next day,71 in certain spots doing so in front of applauding crowds.72 By the end of the year, roughly one-quarter of the city's overhead wires had been removed.73 Removing the wires led to the temporary darkening of some city streets. There had been 1,328 electric street lights in use in New York City as of December 31, 1888; that number fell to just 145 precisely 1 year later.74 But the public's anger was directed at a specific practice -- unsafe overhead wiring -- as opposed to electric lighting in general.
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10 As automobiles became increasingly common, state legislatures enacted rudimentary laws regarding their registration, use, and required equipment. By 1906, well over half of the states had enacted statutes concerning at least one of these topics.85 Though these laws varied in their terms, common provisions called for the registration of vehicles with the state, prescribed that automobile operators had to be licensed, established maximum speed limits, and required simple safety equipment -- frequently brakes, lamps, and a bell, horn, or other signal.86 Early speed limits varied significantly from state to state.
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11 mass-marketed products against the manufacturers of these goods, thereby opening their doors to this sort of claim.98 As the number of automobiles exploded in the 1920s, so too did the volume of automobile accident litigation. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, tort lawsuits involving automobile accidents constituted 25 percent or more of some urban dockets.99 This mass inevitably included some bogus claims.
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12 condition."113 These laws were refined after a series of studies in the 1930s clarified the correlation between impairment and blood alcohol concentrations.114 In New York, a 1941 law declared that when a breath, blood, urine, or saliva test established that a person had a blood alcohol concentration of .15 percent or higher within 2 hours after their arrest for driving while intoxicated, this result would constitute prima facie evidence at trial that the tested individual had been driving in violation of state law.115 This modification of the crime of driving while intoxicated came near the close of an era in which most injuries associated with automobile accidents were blamed on human error.116 In the 1950s and especially the 1960s, attention turned to how automakers might design their motor vehicles to reduce occupant injuries in the event of an accident.117 In 1966, Congress inaugurated the modern era of federal regulation of vehicle design by passing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966118 and the Highway Safety Act of 1966.119 The first of these statutes authorized the promulgation of federal motor vehicle safety standards,120 while the latter created the National Highway Safety Agency to implement the provisions of both its authorizing statute and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act.121 Four years later, Title II of the Highway Safety Act of 1970122 established the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and conferred upon it the authority previously allocated to the National Highway Safety Agency.123 At around the same time, manufacturers' design decisions also came under closer scrutiny in the courts. Beginning in the mid-1960s, almost all states recognized that these companies could be held strictly liable in tort to consumers when their unreasonably unsafe product designs led to injuries -- a concept that will receive more attention later in this report.124 F
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13 fliers129) had a chilling effect on the pursuit of tort claims against air service providers.130 Claims for injury or death against airplane manufacturers for negligence took even longer to appear,131 for reasons including the complexity of aircraft design, difficulties in piecing together the causes of an accident, and a general tendency to blame early mishaps on pilot error.132 But people on the ground had not assumed any risks associated with flying.
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14 appreciated hazard associated with computers and computer systems has involved the exploitation of data by insiders or "hackers."147 Concerns regarding this type of misbehavior have led governments to enact computer-crime laws designed to deter unauthorized access and other forms of computer abuse. Prior to the late-1970s, most misconduct involving computers consisted of fraud or embezzlement schemes that somehow made use of these devices to plunder a bank or another business.148 These crimes generally were addressed within the existing rubric of fraud, theft, and conspiracy laws.
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15 Other new crimes addressed situations where a person "[k] nowingly accesses and without permission takes, copies, or makes use of any data from a computer, computer system, or computer network,"163 or "[k]
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16 this role with other technologies. With some innovations, risks were addressed primarily through the judiciary and damages actions; with others, through criminal laws and other statutes.
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