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  3. It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping

It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping

游客2024-06-12  29
问题    It’s a rough world out there. Step outside and you could break a leg slipping on your doormat. Light up the stove and you could burn down the house. Luckily, if the doormat or stove failed to warn of coming disaster, a successful lawsuit might compensate you for your troubles. Or so the thinking has gone since the early 1980s, when juries began holding more companies liable for their customers’ misfortunes.
   Feeling threatened, companies responded by writing ever-longer warning labels, trying to anticipate every possible accident. Today, stepladders carry labels several inches long that warn, among other things, that you might — surprise! — fall off. The label on a child’s batman cape cautions that toy "does not enable user to fly".
   While warnings are often appropriate and necessary — the dangers of drug interactions, for instance — and many are required by state or federal regulations, it isn’t clear that they actually protect the manufacturers and sellers from liability if a customer is injured. About 50 percent of the companies lose when injured customers take them to court.
   Now the tide appears to be turning. As personal injury claims continue as before, some courts are beginning to side with defendants, especially in cases where a warning label probably wouldn’t have changed anything. In May, Julie Nimmons, president of Schutt Sportswear in Illinois, successfully fought a lawsuit involving a football player who was paralyzed in a game while wearing a Schutt helmet. "We’re really sorry he has become paralyzed, but helmets aren’t designed to prevent those kinds of injuries," says Nimmons. The jury agreed that the nature of the game, not the helmet, was the reason for the athlete’s injury. At the same time, the American Law Institute — a group of judges, lawyers, and academics whose recommendations carry substantial weight — issued new guidelines stating that companies need not warn customers of various dangers or bombard (轰炸) them with a lengthy list of possible ones. "Important information can get buries in a sea of trivialities." says a law professor at Comell Law School who helped draft the new guidelines. "The information on products might actually be provided for the benefit of customers and not as protection against legal liability."                                                                                               (365 words)
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答案 expect protection from law/from the legal system
解析 参见第一段最后两句：幸运的是，如果门垫或炉子没有标有关于可能发生的灾难的警示标签，一个成功的法律诉讼可帮你挽回损失——至少自20世纪80年代早期以来，人们一直持有这样的看法，当时陪审团开始判定厂商要为顾客的不幸负责。
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