Legal Standard

Any lawyers out there?

Being on the back of a hores is considered an inherintly dangerous activity. In Tennessee horse businesses - including riding schools and stables - are shielded from liability considering the unpredictable nature of horses. This law is specific to equestrian activities.

The legal standard for most liability issues is the reasonable and prudent standard. Was the person being held liable acting in the manor of a reasonable a prudent person. Some activities have stricter standards and some are more lax - like horseback riding.

Treeclimbing is a voluntary act performed by people not exercising reasonable and prudent behavior. We engage in an inherintly dangerous activity.

A reasonable and prudent person would not take advice from a message board and blindly use it to climb a tree. Why are so many people worried about posting disclaimers with their posts? Am I unaware of some important precident? Has anyone ever been hauled into court and held liable for a message board posting?

Climbing schools are another matter all together. The instructor should go well beyond reasonable and prudent in respect to his students. There are real liability issues at stake. Such as it is reasonable and prudent for the instructor to be advanced first aid certified and be current on his/her CPR training.

Would it be reasonable to require treeclimbing instructors to be certifeid wilderness first responders - as required of most outdoor school instructors - if they take students into a remote area to climb?

- Josh

Originally posted by prosigna
...Treeclimbing is a voluntary act performed by people not exercising reasonable and prudent behavior.

I disagree. It would be unreasonable to do what I do without little or no training. Proper education and appropriate safety precautions turns "inherently dangerous" into reasonable and prudent.

love
nick

I could not have said it better.

I have to completely disagree. Being aware of danger and mastering methods to contain danger does not make it go away. A well trained, experienced racecar driver is still engaged in an inherintly dangerous activity when traveling at 200+ mph. I think we are argueing over wording and agree on principle, just not on how to say it. Training does not achieve a reasonable and prudent standard but it does remove you from the relm of the foolish and possibly dead.

I do not want to get lost in an arguement over the need for instruction. There are plenty of threads that deal with that. I also do not want to fall into an arguement about the reasons we climb and if we are nuts for doing it. Both are good topics but for a different thread.

I guess the part of my original post that does not sit well is the claim that persons involved in tree climbing are not exercising reasonable and prudent behavior. They are while in the tree. The decision to get into the tree is when they move into an inherently dangerouse activity.

The question I ask is about liability for the authors of posts on a web message board.

I can't imagine that you'd be held liable for saying something on a message board that didn't work out for somebody, but we'll check with our attorney about this and let you know.
Patty

It seems to me that if there were the possibility of repercussions for advice given on web forums everyone would have at least an anecdotal story to tell. In all of the surfing that I've done over the years I've NEVER seen any reference to this issue. Take a second to think about this. There are PLENTY of crazier and more mainstream/popular topics up for discussion than tree climbing. I knwo, I know, that doesn't make sense to most of us climbers. What could be more normal?

My guess at why there are disclaimers at the end of a post would be more on a gentlemanly approach, like saying “this is what worked for me” rather than an “I’m afraid I am going to get sued” approach.

Tree climbing is a voluntary act. It is like fishing. People drown while fishing. Yet people do not sue the water owners. Sharing technique on the pages here would most likely be a form of sharing information. Whether one actually went out and put that information into action would constitute a voluntary act.

Teaching a dangerous climbing technique or practices with documentation describing this dangerous procedure would be rife with liability. Taking some one up into a tree, especially for money, that had dangerous dead wood that happened to fall and hurt or kill- that would certainly be a liability problem if a waiver had not been signed. But even then, with signed waiver in hand, negligence would be hard to defend.