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"Compensation culture" is a pejorative term used to imply that, within a society, a significant number of claims for compensation for torts are unjustified, frivolous, or fraudulent, and that those who seek compensation should be criticised. It is used to describe a "where there's blame, there's a claim" culture of litigiousness in which compensation is routinely and improperly sought without being based on the application of legal principles such as duty of care, negligence, or causation. Ronald Walker QC defines it as "an ethos (believes that ) all misfortunes short of an Act of God are probably someone else's fault, and that the suffering should be relieved, or at any rate marked, by the receipt of a sum of money." The notion of a compensation culture has also been conflated with health and safety legislation and excessively risk-averse decisions taken by corporate bodies in an apparent effort to avoid the threat of litigation. The phrase was coined in an article by Bernard Levin in London's ''The Times'' newspaper dated 17 December 1993. The article, largely a polemic against the welfare state, carried the sub-heading: "We may laugh at ludicrous court cases in America, but the compensation culture began in Britain and is costing us dear." ==Media myth== The term is especially used in tabloid journalism and by advocates of tort reform to describe a perceived legal climate with regard to torts in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Lord Dyson, the third most senior judge in England and Wales, has dismissed the existence of a compensation culture in the UK as a false perception and a "media-created myth." James Hand, writing in the ''Journal of Law and Society'', observed that sensationalist stories about compensation awards "evidently make for good copy; national newspaper articles concerning the compensation culture have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s," while statistics conversely demonstrated "a broad decline" in the number of claims during the same period.〔 Research published in 2006 examined the data held by the Compensation Recovery Unit, a government agency which enabled the state to recover from tort damages any social security benefits paid as a result of an accident or disease. This found "no evidence that the tort system has been flooded with an increasing number of personal injury claims in recent years" and concluded that "the number of claims () been relatively stable since at least 1997–1998," the first year for which statistics were available. George Monbiot, a British writer and political activist, said: "Compensation culture has usurped political correctness, welfare cheats, single mothers and New Age travellers as the right's new bogeyman-in-chief. According to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the Conservative Party and just about every newspaper columnist in Britain, it threatens very soon to bankrupt the country." A Better Regulation Commission (BRC) report published in 2004 concluded that there was no compensation culture in the UK.〔 The commission also found that the myth of the compensation culture was largely perpetuated by the media.〔 Janet Paraskeva, then The Law Society's chief executive, commented: "Ironically, it seems that those who most decry the possibility of a compensation culture are probably responsible for perpetuating the belief that there is one – resulting in more and more of the bizarre decisions by schools and local authorities that journalists are so quick to mock." One analyst put it more bluntly: "Loose talk of a 'compensation culture' no doubt helps to sell the very sorts of newspapers that purport to despise it most." Levin's 1993 article related the details of several personal injury claims which had succeeded in the United States, and warnings of 'American-style litigiousness' arriving in the UK were common in many articles in the domestic media during the late 1990s. This coincided with vigorous lobbying in the United States by special interest groups and business organisations in support of product liability reform which would place restrictions on laws allowing consumers to sue companies for damages caused by faulty products. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「compensation culture」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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