American Law & Duty to Strangers

Mary Ann Glendon discusses the issue of responsibility in law and finds that the law is silent on certain issues, a silence that she says partially lifts in the world of legal discourse where we find that our acts or agreements involve us in a variety of duties. However, there is also an absence of duty to act that to many seems to condone irresponsibility. The subject that Glendon cites is the fact that the law has consistently refused to impose on a stranger the moral obligation to give aid to another human being who is in danger, even in danger of losing his or her life. This means that unless we have entered into a relationship giving rise to duties, we are treated by the law as strangers to one another, and as such we have no duties to one another. This is an example of one of the conceptions of rights in American law that Glendon criticizes. This is in opposition to A.J. Dyck's view that nurture is a strict requirement of justice, which would mean that we owe a duty to one another as human beings, regardless of relationship.

Glendon finds that American law has failed to develop a more expansive view of what citizens owe to one another while the law in Europe has taken a different course:

European countries do impose a legal duty on individuals to come to the aid of an imperiled person where that can be done without risk of harm to the rescuer. And the constitutions of many other liberal democracies do obligate government to protect the health and safety of c

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pt when the potential rescuer is responsible for that person's situation or distress of when the two are linked by a relationship, but the law's conception of special relationship is not what common sense might dictate. The courts recognize a duty first for those who provide a service to the public, such as transportation, and this category was later expanded to include other relationships, usually where there was some expectation of protection on one side and some potential or existing financial benefit on the other. Such relationships as recognized to date arise mainly from employment, contractual, or other economic arrangements (Glendon 81). Glendon points out that given the overall success of American lawyers in persuading the courts to recognize new causes of action for personal injury, it is surprising that they have as yet been unable to stretch the exceptions in rescue cases. A number of reasons are evident in the literature as to why the no-duty-to-rescue rule is the law. The first of these is said by Glendon to be plainly mistaken, and this is that the origins of the rule can be found in the extreme individualism typical of Anglo-Saxon legal thinking. Glendon says this is simply wrong, and affirmative legal duties

Category: Government - A