In Peterborough, Ontario, 21-year-old Christopher Green died after being crushed by an 800-pound Coca-Cola dispenser. The young man was trying to steal a Coke by tipping the machine toward him, and had asked his friends to push from behind.

However, in a travesty of justice as bizarre as the actual event, instead of Coca-Cola’s suing Mr. Green’s estate for damage to its property, his family has sued Coca-Cola for negligence. In it they complain that the soft drink manufacturer “ought to have known that it was a common and reasonably foreseeable practice among young people to obtain free drinks from the defendant’s dispensing machines by tilting the machines forward.”

Nor is this merely a nuisance case. James Dram, technical vice-president for Coca-Cola Ltd., thinks enough of it to have replied that the industry is studying ways to bolt down the dispensing machines. “We’re working on it as diligently as we can,” he said.

Unfortunately, such perversion of the law is by no means confined to central Canada. The British Columbia Court of Appeal has recently upheld a lower court ruling against a helicopter skiing company for delivering two men to the slopes of a lodge in the Purcell Mountains. Soon after, the two skiers died in an avalanche.

The heli-skiing company was found guilty of negligence, even though the two men were expert skiers and had signed detailed waivers relieving the company of all responsibility.

What is going on here? Has the notion of personal responsibility been banished entirely from the legal scene? What happened to the natural law doctrine of “caveat emptor,” under which goods and services were sold on an “as is” basis, and the vendor took no responsibility for accidents, let alone theft on the part of the buyer?

If things continue along the present legal path, there will scarcely remain anyone in business to produce a football helmet, hockey skate, soccer ball, teeter-totter, motorcycle, swing set, sailboat, lawn mower, meat grinder, or any other equipment which might conceivably be involved in a mishap.

It is difficult to explain this movement away from “caveat emptor.” But one possibility might be the influence of a new movement in law and economics which is concerned with measurement and information. In this perspective, it is of the utmost importance to reduce information costs of all kinds, but particularly those associated with risk.

Great emphasis is placed on the fact that Coca-Cola may be presumed to know more about the accident possibilities of its dispensers than would the general public, and that the helicopter company has greater information about possible avalanches than would even tourists who are expert skiers. In like manner, the man ufacturers of sporting equipment and consumer machinery are assumed to be far more knowledgeable about their products than are the ultimate users.

If this is the case then, according to economists who should know better, information costs may be reduced by holding the producer responsible for any mishaps, not the consumer.

The problem with this view is that costs are subjective. Costs are the alternatives forgone through any act of choice. As such, only the individual economic actor is in a position to know what opportunities are given up when an option is selected.

Consider the helicopter case. It is wrong to assume that despite an explicit agreement between the two parties absolving the helicopter company of responsibility, that the skier is ignorant of the true costs of the risk. All we have to go on is a voluntary contract between the company and the vacationer. From this we can deduce that in the minds of both parties the agreement was worthwhile. As it turned out, of course, tragedy struck. But it does not follow that, in the future, information costs can be reduced, and the public good promoted, by setting aside contracts which incorporate the knowledge of both consenting parties.