5. Make the plaintiff more responsible for his own behavior

This is a companion concept to the restoration of causation. Our current litigation environment has been teaching the members of our society that they are no longer responsible for their own actions. Someone else is always to blame. If a person gets hurt, it becomes a scramble to see how many others can be named as the guilty culprits. No matter how much the plaintiffs' attorney may have to stretch, someone else with a lot of money will always end up paying in the end, or so the contemporary litigation ethic goes.

This view of liability must be corrected, and the key place to start is with the individual. The individual must learn to take care of himself, to watch out for his own safety. The legal system must craft rules under which individuals who fail to look out for their own safety carry the consequences of the actions by themselves, instead of shifting them to other parties. For example, plaintiffs should not be able to recover damages due to injuries caused by obvious dangers. If a product has risks that are obvious to a reasonable prudent product user and which are of common knowledge to persons in a similar position to that of the plaintiff, the product should not be deemed "defective" on the pretense that it failed to warn of the obvious risk. A knife manufacturer should not need to warn product users that a knife can cut. Manufacturers should not be required to be universal insurers for even the most irresponsible members of society.

A legitimate question to ask is whether a plaintiff primarily responsible for his own injury should ever be permitted to recover against a defendant. In many states, comparative negligence is not applied when the plaintiff is more than 50% at fault. Such a scheme could be used to limit liability, as opposed to the institution of complete comparative negligence (abolishing joint and several liability). By using the 50% cutoff, all members of society would know that recovery is not available for injuries that are primarily attributable to the injured party, thereby promoting greater individual care and reducing litigation in an area where plaintiffs' claims are least compelling.