Crazy Courtroom Rules and Suing Cars

October 15, 2010 - Next time you're preparing for trial and griping about putting on a tie, be glad you're not a Wisconsin lawyer in Judge Gene Gasiorkiewicz's Racine courtroom.

The good judge has some strict rules for attire in his courtroom, including a requirement for ties and coats for men, no shorts, flip-flops, short skirts, or cleavage-baring blouses. And now, no unapproved coffee cups.

Gasiorkiewicz ordered around 100 travel mugs "approved" for use in his courtroom, costing about $300 in all. The silver mugs are engraved with the scales of justice and "RACINE CIRCUIT COURT BRANCH 2" so everyone knows whose courtroom you're taking your half-caf soy double latte to.

His justification for all the rules is to bring back dignity and decorum into the courtroom. The coffee cup debate came about when he would see super-slurpee sized cups with huge straws, small coffee mugs, and all sorts of beverage containers in his courtroom. It's not that he's against letting people drink their coffee or whatever, he claims he just wanted uniformity.

Today's headlines: strict coffee cup rules and how to sue a car.

Also in the news has been the secret Google Car project that the search engine giant has been keeping under wraps until recently. The modified Toyota Prius can actually drive itself with little assistance from human input. It's traveled over 140k miles without incident...except the one time another driver rear-ended it.

It's actions like that where things get questionable. In this case, the accident was a rear-end collision, which most of the time is the other driver's fault. But now we're wondering: who's to blame if a computer-driven car causes an accident? You can't exactly sue a machine or a computer program, so who's at fault?

Right now, a technician rides along inside the vehicle and makes minor adjustments to the program as needed. So when these sorts of vehicles hit the market, can drivers still be held accountable for an accident their mainly computer-driven car causes?

It's a similar dilemma to the claims of accelerator pedals sticking in earlier Toyota models. Was it a manufacturer defect that caused the accident, or operator error? In some cases, evidence wasn't enough to prove either side of the case, and this could be a future concern for the Google Car.

This may open up a whole new branch of liability law as computer intelligence continues to improve and appear more frequently in our daily lives. We may truly have an "I, Robot" situation on our hands in the next decade!

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