Oregon Legal Research Blog
Our favorite Justice William W. Bedsworth (not to be confused with Justice William T. Bedsworth), regales us with tales of European travel in his September 2010, Criminal Waste of Space column, in the OC Lawyer Magazine:
The Justice visits his first biergarten and lurches about on a rooftop tour, in harness — the mind boggles, so read the column yourself – and laugh:
The Same Only Different, by Justice William W. Bedsworth:
Excerpt:
“… Oh yeah, the waivers. Picture this: We are twenty randomly-selected Canadian and American tourists. We have been selected so randomly I am NOT the least athletic person in the group. Not even close. And one of our number—obviously concerned about the Obamazation of America—has already asked the tour guide if the government owns all the buildings in Sweden, so we aren’t exactly the best and the brightest, either.(6)
We are staggering around on these little foot-wide tracks to which our harnesses are hooked with a steel cable to keep us from falling off the roof. We are more than ten stories above ground and the roof is not flat. We are not only maneuvering our flabby bodies around the hot wheels track we have been hooked to, and the tiny ladders that connect sections of track that go over gables and cupolas, but bending down every ten yards or so to jiggle our harness clip around the catchpoints designed to keep us from falling to splattery Swedish deaths if we lose our balance. Three Cirque du Soleil cast members in our group have thrown up their hands and turned back rather than attempt it.
And the indemnity agreements, the waivers they had us sign before engaging in this death-defying feat of physical legerdemain? Are they air-tight? Well, not exactly.
What they are is air.
They’re non-existent. There are no waivers. There aren’t even warnings….” (Link to full column.)