An Explanation of the Name: BPL in Daily Life

As an initial post, it seemed appropriate to explain what "The Learned Hand" refers to. For any of you who have some experience in the legal field, this explanation should not be surprising. In law school, instruction is done by individually reading assigned judicial opinions (the written copy of the court's ruling and its reasoning), almost always contained in a large textbook (think 9th grade English Class reader which contained lots of short stories, but with bigger words and duller stories), and then discussing them in class. At the beginning of almost all of the opinions is the name of the judge who wrote it. After reading enough of these, one begins to recognize the names of certain judges. One such judge was the Honorable Judge Learned Hand. As for why I decided to use it, well... its just a great name!

One thing Judge Hand did was write an opinion which became well known for utilizing something called the BPL test. Simply put the BPL test attempts to balance risk and utility. Utility balancing tests are used often in law, especially when the law is more like a standard (e.g. use the care a reasonable person would use in the same circumstance) instead of a bright-line rule (e.g. 55 MPH speed limit). The idea of BPL is that someone might be negligent (i.e. failed to use reasonable care) depending on the balancing of the risk of harm occurring * the gravity of the possible harm compared with the cost or difficulty in preventing the harm. For example, in one case, a man was electrocuted and killed when he moved his amateur radio antenna and hit a live electrical wire above his house. The question was, was the electric company negligent for not putting an insulated covering on the wires? A BPL analysis would attempt to balance the likelihood of someone coming in contact with the wire (if high enough, probably small) * the possible harm (likely death) with the cost of insulating all electrical wires ($$$). The idea is that if the cost is reasonable [utility] compared with the risk of harm [risk], then it would be negligent not to take the preventative act. On the other hand, if the cost was very high and the amount of prevention very small, then it might not be negligent to fail to take the preventative act.

Putting aside the difficulty in comparing money with human injury, this is a formula that people use all the time. The other day my wife and I were cleaning her car because we were trading it in. We were able to vacuum and clean the entire inside of the car in about 1 hr, but there was a certain spot on the inside molding that would not come clean. Since we only had a limited time to work on the car, we opted not to spend too much additional time on that spot. Why? Because of utility. For the small return (getting a small spot clean) it would take too much time and effort (perhaps a half hour or more when we only had 2 hrs total). Utility balancing is used throughout daily life. It is therefore not much surprise that it has found its way into law. Whether this is a good thing, though, especially when human life and money are compared on the scales of justice, is debatable.