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What’s Really Going on with Liquor Liability in South Carolina?
Small businesses are drowning under South Carolina’s wildly unfair and impractical liquor liability laws. Is a solution in sight?
8 comments
Its pretty screwed up that trial lawyers, who stand to benefit from a lack of tort reform, and obscene liquor liability laws, are allowed to sit on the committees that draft the bills related to those issues.
No different than those same trial lawyers selecting and approving the judges in the state. The whole system doesn’t even look right and it stinks.
That H5066 is troubling. Encouraging restaurants to close early? WTF? In and around the Greater Columbia Area, it has gotten ridiculous, trying to find anywhere open past 9PM through the week. In the 70’s and 80’s, with a much lower population density than today, chain restaurants could be found open till 11:00PM or midnight, even later. Those are scarce if they exist at all, anymore. It is as though nobody gets hungry after 9PM, actually 8PM if you are hitting a restaurant that closes at 9PM. At least that is what the restaurants seem to think.
The idea of restaurant, bar, or store liability needs to be vacated, or at least diminished. Bar, restaurant, and store, employees are not police officers. They are not trained as cops, equipped as cops, or have the power of cops. When a drunk leaves their establishment or property, whatever limited control they might have had over this person is gone. If the drunk goes out and injures or kills someone, guess what? That drunk is the one 100% responsible for the injury or death.
I am unaware of a Constitutional right to a deep pocket to pick, if I or one of my family should be injured or killed by a DUI driver. Yes, if the drunk did not have adequate insurance, it sucks. It really does, but making a secondary victim of a bar, restaurant, or store, is not the answer.
That Luke Rankin is an obstructionist to reform is no surprise. He has tried to block restoration of stolen gun rights for years, using his position in The Senate. Why do the people in Horry County keep sending this POS back, term after term?
Of each $1 million in liability insurance that bars are required to maintain, $333,333 or more will go to ambulance chasing injury lawyers. This is the sole reason for the law, to enrich the injury lawyers in the state legislature.
This editorial fails to present a fair statement of the facts and issues in contention. First, because SC does not require insurers to make “Rate Filings” no one understands how insurance companies are setting their rates. It is certainly not beyond the pale of reason to be wary of how insurance companies manage and assign risk through premiums. It would be beyond foolish to mess with a statutory scheme having absolutely no understanding of how or whether this legislation would have the desired effect on premiums. Second, insurance premiums have risen across all lines of insurance over the past two years, liquor liability is by no means an outlier (see inflation). Third, the wording of the polling questions posed by the SCGOP was extremely poor. Biased questions lead to biased polling results. If we ever want government to provide an intelligent and reasonable legislative response, we must evaluate the data and have a discussion about legitimate ways to address unfair premium increases. The testimony from the former insurance commissioner for Missouri and New Jersey provided good insight on how we can intelligently discuss and address this issue (2/13/24 Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing). Gutting protections for DUI victims based on a wink and a nod from the insurance lobby is like wagering your kid’s 529 in Vegas. Maybe you get lucky, but you’re more likely find out how hotel corporations can afford such extravagant casinos.
Unless you would agree to limit lawyers’ contingency fees, your arguments are hollow. One-third of all liability insurance payouts go to lawyers, not their clients.
How does that have anything to do with making sensible regulations that are fair to victims and businesses. Contingency fees are set by contracts which victim family’s can choose to enter into or not. Lawyers aren’t the problem here. Potentially unscrupulous insurers, irresponsible bars, and thoughtless criminals/tortfeasors are root causes.
If someone walks out of a bar with a .17 and kills/maims someone, no one should lose sleep when the bar gets hit with a huge verdict and has to close because they can no longer afford insurance. That’s our system working to protect us! If, on the other hand, insurance companies are “socializing” risk instead of adequately vetting training and management practices, that’s unfair. Requiring rate filings for liquor liability insurers is the only way we will ever resolve whether something untoward is happening.
Anecdotal claims of rate spikes from a bar that contributed to a death(s) is not a sufficient basis to upend a scheme that has many years of precedent behind it.
An excerpt from this Diane Hardy article:
“Covid-19 policies were activated across South Carolina. For many of us that time has become a blur we would rather not revisit – but it’s important to remember that while the Palmetto State’s Covid restrictions were lighter than in many other states, restaurants bore the brunt of the overreach. Governor Henry McMaster’s executive order in March for only take-out dining – then later limiting restaurants to only 50 percent capacity – was not fully lifted until October of 2020.”
When COVID-19 first hit the shores of America, we and the world did not know anything about this disease; other than people were dying from this. Coroners were having to rent refrigerator trailers to hold the bodies.
Using data from the CDC and state reporting agencies for the year 2021 (the first full year), over 285,000 Americans died. It sounds pretty callous for Mrs. Hardy to want COVID-19 to rampantly spread and kill hundreds, thousands more, so small businesses would remain open to the public.
What if small business owners died from COVID-19, and the business closed. That’s a loss for Mrs. Hardy’s Mom and Pop Alliance.