It’s time to create a TJ Hooper for information security
T.J. Hooper was a precedent-setting tort case in 1932. While I’m not a lawyer, I have a good friend, Ron Coleman, Esq., who blogs about law issues, so a bit of jurisprudence has rubbed off on me. In Hooper, Judge Learned Hand described what is now called the calculus of negligence or the Hand Test.
The case’s specifics are that two tugboats, one of which was the T.J. Hooper, were towing barges. During a storm, the barges sunk, and their cargoes were lost. The owners of the cargo sued the barge owners, who in turn sued the tugboat owners. They claimed that the tug operators were negligent because they failed to equip their tugs with radios that would have warned them of the bad weather.
The tugboat companies were defended under the prevailing practice theory. They claimed that because no other tugboat operators in the area were using radios, this constituted the standard of care for the industry. Judge Hand found the tugboat companies liable because they did not use readily available technology, the radio receivers, to listen for broadcast weather reports, even though the use of radios was not yet standard industry practice.
Hand astutely observed that “in most cases, reasonable prudence is, in fact, common prudence, but strictly it is never its measure. A whole calling may have unduly lagged in…
