Claims Against BP Should Be Labled as Illegitimate

The environmental disaster caused in part by lack of oversight by the staff of BP in charge of the rig have caused both environmental damage as well as damage to the livelihood of many American citizens dependent upon the Gulf for their particular industry.  Here I will discuss only the latter’s claims against BP and the coming lawsuits.

These individuals who wish to sue BP unfortunately lack legal recourse for their losses.  No matter how fancy of a lawyer you may find or how willing a judge is to punish BP there is simply no standing here.  What has happened is terrible indeed but there is no need to resort to a perversion of the legal system to seek redress.  This is why BP was quoted as saying they will honor all legitimate claims.  The spill is destroying fertile fishing waters and tourism spots.

As far as the fishing industry goes in order to stake a claim you must first prove that your property has been damaged and that BP has committed a wrong against you and thus requires the legal system to right this wrong.  What property has been damaged?  The fishing waters and the organisms within it yet these resources are not owned by anyone.  As a result of not being private property of anyone the ocean and the organisms within it are outside the realm of human action and thus the legal system.  Essentially these fisherman are staking a claim to all the fish, shrimp, lobster, etc as a collective unit and that the oil spill has taken away their catch.  The same principal applies if, lets say, a prime deer hunting area is used by hunters to supply deer of which they consume, sell, or trade for various purposes.  Logging company X moves in and through their operations drives out the deer and destroys the hunters’ way of life and economic status.  Could these men and women really take such a claim to court and expect redress?  Expect to be compensated for something they never owned in the first place?  The deer in this example is the same as the fish in the sea these fisherman wish to seek redress for the loss of.  In the deer example I presuppose private property rights by the logging company but in the current BP case there is no private property.  This well is out in the middle of ocean in which no one holds a claim to.

The only way in which fisherman were to have standing and thus seek redress in a court of law would be if each individual fisherman owned a claim to given patch of ocean of Q and as the oil affects Q the fisherman could then take BP to court for the destruction of property.  I will not go into detail of such a privatisation scheme but we have done it with the moving organisms on land and there is no reason why we cannot do the same with the moving marketable organisms of the ocean.

In conclusion, I would like to be clear that while these fisherman lack no standing in a court of law to sue over resources they never owned of which they happened to build a business around BP should still do the moral thing and compensate these hard working people for their loss.  I do not mean satisfy claims of hardship or emotional struggle but to provide market value for their capital goods sunk in their business, vocational training for the displaced business owners, and possibly a payment that could be used to cover moving costs and a jump start on a new home to aid in relocation.  Let us be real here.  If this spill continues to spread these men and women will have nothing left and it is the responsibility of BP, who has final responsibility over that well, to compensate for damages.  I only seek to show that there is no legal remedy due to the fact no private property was damaged and no one was aggressed against.  The solution for this sort of thing in the future is to allow private property rights to spread to the oceans and protect against environmental disasters such as this, negligence by the company involved, and the tendency to drag out litigation.