Uber arbitration award over Emily Normandin-Parker’s death

> The bad guy here is the driver.

We can agree that the driver made bad choices but I feel like you are skimming over the 2 women's responsibility in this situation. Intoxicated to the point of vomiting, arguing over the cleaning fee, and wandering away from the car while parked, yes illegally, on the freeway.

Not sure what your experiences have been with drunk people but I can tell you that dealing with 1 drunk person can be hard to control, let alone 2.

I'd be interested to hear where other people draw the line on the driver's culpability. If he left them at a gas station and one of them was still hit and killed by a car would he still be at fault? In my mind Uber/Lyft provide transportation, they aren't babysitters, there has to be a limit to their responsibility. Perhaps the driver was more at fault here but this outcome (how the driver reacted) is not in the slightest bit surprising to me given everything I know about Uber and how it treats drivers and passengers.

This sounds about right. When Uber's driverless car killed someone they got off pretty easy:

*"In March 2019, Arizona prosecutors ruled that Uber was not criminally responsible for the crash. The back-up driver of the vehicle was charged with negligent homicide, pled guilty to endangerment, and was sentenced to three years' probation." [0]

0:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg

> The bad guy here is the driver. Could Uber have done more?

Isn't their entire business model build around bypassing the regulations build around the taxi industry? Things like training for new drivers and I think they even refused to do mandatory background checks early on.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

When their driverless car ran over a cyclist they pretended it was too dark to see anything, using a video from a cheap camera as "evidence".

Yes the driver made a poor decision in a situation that he was not trained for. However enrolling and onboarding the driver is a part of Uber's process. The situation may have been avoided if Uber had this strict clause in its onboarding manual to never stop the car or drop the passenger at unsafe spot. The driver and rider are bound by the Uber negotiated contract atleast until the end of ride.

On the driverless cars, the chances are that the companies would come up with some innovative legal clause to add to their terms and services to avoid taking any liability from the driverless car's action.

There was no world in which driverless cars weren't the eventual outcome anyway.

And, it's not exactly taking responsibility for the driver. It's taking responsibility for the safety of the passenger using their service. This is a different thing. Driverless cars still can't allow their passengers to get injured and killed which is going to present a lot of technical and social challenges for these companies.

They all thought that playing a word game would get them out of the difficult problems all transportation companies have to solve and be liable for.

> But the reality is that this is a victory for the driverless cars (Waymo, Tesla, etc.). If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

Is it, though? If there is no driver to blame, then liability lies solely with Uber (or Waymo, as the case may be). I am not sure that that is a win from their PoV.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility for the driver, the simplest thing is to get rid of the driver.

No. The easiest thing to do would be arbitrate against uber. Deploying a fleet of self driving cars would be much, much more complicated.

A company is liable for the actions of its workers whether they are W2 employees or 1099 independent contractors. That distinction governs the relationship between the worker and the company, not the company and its customers.

A worker's criminal actions also usually do not entail criminal liability for the company except in very rare situations.

Uber is bad too for not training drivers to not do something like this.

> If you want to force Uber to take responsibility... the simplest thing is...

To use the force of law and government to force them to take responsibility.

Every other answer is bullshit.

Do you expect that Waymo will not take responsibility for the driverless car?

You all realize that when AI takes everyone's jobs the only way people will survive is by pledging allegiance to AI companies so they feed and house them right? Its not going to lead to some utopia where people are free to paint and write novels all day. People will basically become slaves to these companies.

I would think twice about pushing for driverless cars and replacing people with agentic workflows.

Cars are an amazing way to shift liability around. Try to start your own rail line, good luck. Have 10,000 drivers with 10,000 accidents? no problem.

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And surely the DMV has far greater 'vicarious liability', as they're the ones that issue licenses.

There's this prevailing narrative that someday self-driving cars will eliminate all human-controlled driving and that these types of stories are like milestones in the path to that future utopia.

But I don't think that's the case anymore than the narrative that LLMs will eventually displace all software engineers.

I have been on both sides of arbitration, winning and losing. It’s much better. Basically legislation done right (for civil matters).

The only people who really win from traditional legislation are lawyers (and plaintiffs counsel who use the long expensive process to blackmail people - which is 90% of civil cases)

In this case, that doesn't seem to be what happened? The judge ruled against them.

Worth noting that this is only for the civil responsibility, that is, deciding the award of damages.

The criminal charges, if any, whether to the driver or to Uber management (possibly from the sham structuring of worker categorization and corporate structure in order to reduce tax liabilities while reducing control and thus endangering consumers) are proper in state criminal courts and can never be delegated to private courts.

Moreso it’s them whining about losing when and trying to add a non-disparagement clause at $10m per event to the settlement for even factual information relating to the case.

Uber were the ones who forced arbitration ostensibly because it often lowers their overall legal and damages bills.

In that case why is there a "settlement agreement" mentioned that has a $10M penalty for disparagement? Not sure what that refers to exactly but how can Uber (try to) dictate terms in the settlement?

It does seem they're trying to get out of it somehow.

We all know the talking points from big corporations about why they force everyone into arbitration out of the goodness of their hearts. We don't need it regurgitated as if it's the truth.

> Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given some sort of ADR a go first.

But Uber's terms explicitly force consumers to waive their right to go to court if they want to access Uber's service.

Arbitration is fine. There's no reason people shouldn't be allowed to freely engage the services of an arbitrator.

What people take issue with is forced arbitration. The problem isn't really about the arbitration at all, the problem is the part where you lose access to the courts. That should not be allowed.

> Of course, in most jurisdictions nothing stops you from going to court first if you like. But most modern-thinking judges tend to take a dim view if you turn up in front of them without having given ADR a go first.

“Nothing is stopping you” - most TOSes mandate arbitration, and unless you have something particularly egregious and a sympathetic judge the first thing on the docket is going to be a Motion to Dismiss.

And agreed. For better or worse. My minor stepdaughter was involved in a car accident. No liability was found, and the other party tried to sue her in Small Claims court which, in my state, you can’t sue a minor in (as no attorneys are permitted, so you’d have a minor representing themselves). The judge noted this, and told the other party “if you want to sue you will need to sue her parents or guardians”… and then tried to push us into binding arbitration anyway.

Which of course got my insurance company upset and involving attorneys on procedural/constitutional law, about challenging the judges authority to push us into that given there was no jurisdiction to hear the case in the first place so there was none to enforce us into arbitration (which in itself was an entirely separate farce, including where the “neutral” arbitrator berated me and said “I don’t understand why, as a person, if you know your insurance is going to be the one paying, you don’t just agree to give them all they’re asking for.”).

Secret justice is not justice.

No, you would say it needs to be reformed and funded, we have an extremely legalistic society that allows endless delaying and does not fund its core services very well.

It sure is contextual. And nobody would disagree with your examples. The difference here seems to be more of a power imbalance than any objection to terms. In particular, terms of service are often very dense documents. Many people are only presented these documents at the moment they sign up for a service. And people are not usually careful in these situations. I bet most of the Uber signups were outside of bars or venues where someone really needed to get home. So there’s some duress there. So it’s probably not that cut and dried. It’s more analogous to presenting a contract to harvest your wheat field the day before a big rain. If you’re the only guy with a combine for miles then that puts you in a position of relative power. And historically the US hasn’t permitted people to exploit their positions to the maximum extent, usually when it would be immoral by the standards of society. I think this exists in a gray area. It’s not that easy.

I think my gripe is less that it exists and more so that it's not a negotiated agreement. I think it should only be allowed if the contract was negotiated between two parties with full authority to offer any terms in the negotiation. If it's a standardized, take it or leave it, contract where one party has no opportunity to offer alternative terms that get proper and full consideration by the other party, it shouldn't be allowed. In most of the examples you give, they are contracts that have been clearly negotiated between parties, not click-wrapped take it or leave it, my way or the highway, terms.

i think the keyword is "forced". there's very little now that the consumer can do because it seems everything requires arbitration now and people still have to operate in society.

I think such terms should require signatures and initials. Holding people to terms they are unaware of is not fair.

> What's the line?

The line that minimum should be against using this as a tool against consumers. To the extent it should exist at all, which is arguable, it must be between parties that are either equal in standing or have genuine commercial disputes between duly organized business entities.

But if it means they'll be out of a job they will be less likely to do it.

I don't think its unreasonable to argue that Uber has a duty not to hand riders over to known reckless drivers.

The MP3 lawsuits were filed in the districts in which the defendants resided. Almost all of the 94 districts had MP3 sharing lawsuits.

You are probably thinking of patents. For a long time the Eastern District of Texas (EDTX) was by far the most popular choice for patent lawsuits by far, especially against big tech companies.

Then there was a Supreme Court decision (TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC, 581 U.S. 258 (2017)) [1]. It made it so corporations can only be sued for patent infringement in the state where they are incorporated or a district where they have both infringed and have a regular and established place of business.

EDTX is largely a rural district with no really major cities. Most big tech companies have no physical offices there.

Many of those cases moved to the Western District of Texas (WDTX). WDTX includes Austin, and a whole lot of big tech has offices there.

There was one judge in Waco whose court was particularly attractive to patent lawsuits, due to having plaintiff-friendly procedures and a rapid trial schedule. 100% of patent cases filed in Waco went to him. In a few years his court was handling 20% of all patents cases in the entire country.

The Supreme Court and Congress did not like so many patent cases being handled by a single judge, and the WDTX Chief Judge making it so patent cases filed in WDTX are random distributed among its 13 judges.

Cases against big tech companies mostly moved to Delaware (where many big tech companies are incorporated) or Northern California.

EDTX regained the number one spot for patent cases after that, although not from big tech cases. Delaware and Northern California remain the big places for those.

EDTX is #1 because even though it is rural and has almost no big tech presence, it still has major retailers, grocery chains, distribution centers, and communication hubs. For patent suits not against big tech it still works fine.

Also, Heartland did not apply to international defendants. They can still be sued in any district in the US.

The biggest reason EDTX is a popular choice if you can pick it is not plaintiffs do particularly well there. It depends on when you look because it has varied quite a bit, but there are often other districts where plaintiffs win more.

The big reasons are:

• Patent litigation is complex, both for the court and the attorneys. Regardless of which side of the case is on you want a court with experience. If the court is inexperienced the case can drag on which is expensive, burning up lots of billable hours of the expensive patent litigation firm you are using. EDTX has many patent experienced judges, and has developed rules and procedures to move cases along.

• In addition to cases moving along efficiently once they get going, the get going faster in EDTX.

Patent suits are civil cases. They take a back seat to criminal cases. EDTX simply does not have much federal crime (or state crime that ends up in federal district courts).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TC_Heartland_LLC_v._Kraft_Food...

Louis founded the Consumer Rights wiki and also wrote the article that's the subject of this NH thread.

Mr Rossman will literally tell you to use an ad-blocker to watch his videos and refuses to take sponsorships, actively does not want money from making YouTube videos and just wants to get the word out. I'd agree with you if it was literally any other creator.

Louis Rossman does not take sponsorships, and turns off ads for his videos as much as YouTube allows. His videos are for his opinions, not making money.