Okay, this is what I'm ****ing talking about...

I used to describe academic difficulty in this context.  When I took my second semester of general chemistry, I would sometimes read a page over and over again and literally not understand what they were trying to say.  That never happened in most classes.  Mostly, just in chemistry.

I figured that if I had continued in the hard sciences, I'd have a lot more situations like that, where a concept is so odd that I just had trouble understanding it. 

I've even heard very prominent scientists (Ph.D.s doing cutting edge work) who said that they had no actual conceptual understanding of some scientific principles.  Instead, they simply got to where they memorized the explanation by rote, and that allowed them to do what they had to do.  However, they did not understand it in their bones.

I just ran across my first moment of that in the torts book.  There have been some concepts that are tough to understand, but this one was the first where I had to read the pages about 10 times to finally understand what the heck they were talking about.

In states with comparative negligence (where they might say that although somebody acted negligently, and you got injured, but you also acted negligently, so your award will be reduced), they may also add a phrase like, "the defense of assumption of the risk is abolished".

Which, to a literate person, would mean that you, as the defendant, could not argue that you were not-negligent, and that the person who was injured was doing so while fully knowing and assuming the risks inherent in an activity is allowed to put forth a suit despite a primary assumption of risk.

(For instance, a ski slope is not negligent if you ski down the hill, fall down and get hurt.  It's impossible to offer skiing as an activity without the risk of falling.  The slope operators are not being negligent.  You basically assumed the risk of the activity when you did it.)

However, that's not what this means at all.  This is the sort of stuff I alluded to a few posts back where sometimes you think you understand the law and an attorney just sort of winces and says, "Well, literally, that's what it says, but they're not talking about that.  They're talking about this other thing."

What this means is that secondary assumption of risk (which means that the defendant acted negligently, but you chose to continue, anyway), is treated as though it is negligence by the plaintiff (which reduces his settlement in a comparative negligence jurisdiction.)

This stuff can easily get confusing.  It's a wonder law students pass their classes, given that they have to master a pretty detailed level of arcana in 5 classes every semester.  I mean, yeah, it's not hard to make a not of this one wierdness, and so far it's by far the wierdest in the book.  However, remembering dozens of wierd situations in a handful of classes starts to be a trick.

Anyway, I understand it now, but it took a while.  Long time since that happened.  In fact, it hasn't happened to me since 1988.