re: #171 lawhawk

The families can still sue. Will they win? That’s the better question.

They might still be able to get past the initial hurdles because of gross negligence on the part of the company (using inferior materials, cobbling things together, knowing they had failures in past, and continued doing the same thing without changing process) - that they knew that they were engaging in malfeasance and continued to operate in this fashion anyways.

Think of it in the same way that you go to an amusement park and there’s a liability waiver on the ticket. If a park ride malfunctions and you’re injured, you can still sue, because the ride was within the company’s control and they failed to maintain it properly, or there was gross negligence or malfeasance involved.

I think another issue would be whether the waiver was actually “knowing”. You can put all the risk language in the waiver you want, but if there was no way for passengers to know the sub was only designed for a depth of, say, 2000 meters, and that was expressly mentioned in the waiver, the waiver doesn’t mean shit.