Never get sued again, thanks to a new type of wallpaper that can convey over-broad warnings to your company patrons or houseguests!

Background:

Liability law is extremely complicated and counterintuitive.

However, one common factor is that it appears to generally be beneficial—or legally required—for the owner of a potential hazard to warn others about that hazard (e.g. the omnipresent California Prop 65 warnings: “Warning: This location contains chemicals that are known to cause cancer”).

The issue:

Unfortunately, these Prop 65 warning signs have two issues:

  1. They only cover a limited subset of dangerous situations
  2. The warnings are inapplicable to normal residential hazards (e.g. fire, electrocution hazard).

Proposal:

We can bring the potential liability reduction of the Prop 65 warning to all homeowners (not just business owners) with a new type of wallpaper that lists every conceivable hazard on it (Figure 1).

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Fig. 1: This wallpaper attempts to list all potential dangers. Additional hazards (e.g. shark attack, freezing hazard, cross-traffic-does-not-stop, etc.) may be added by writing them in using a regular permanent marker.

Consider the following situation:

  1. A houseguest is bitten by 99 snakes (that were disguising themselves as a carpet)
  2. Then the houseguest sues the owner of the house for the cost of their medical expenses.

Now, at the civil trial, the homeowner can point to a photo of their wallpaper and say “Your Honor, it says right here that there is a ‘snake possibility,’ so my guest should have been well aware of this potential danger.” See Figure 2 for an example of what this photo might show.

Whether or not that would hold any legal weight is a question for the great legal minds of our time, of course.

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Fig. 2: An example of what this wallpaper might look like in a residential home. It CLEARLY states that there is a potential snake-related hazard, among other possible dangers.

How to create the list of warnings:

You might think it would be difficult to create a comprehensive list of warnings, but this is actually the easiest part: we simply collect all civil lawsuits and list out every single thing that a lawsuit ever happened over, and then add that to the wallpaper. At 12-point font, it would be possible to easily fit millions of unique warnings on a standard wall.

PROS: May (in a theoretical world in which lawsuits are resolved by robots) help reduce legal liability AND bring high-class interior decoration to a room.

CONS: It is unclear if this legal strategy would be successful, as it is has presumably not yet been tested in court.