Are auctions open for being sued?

[What'saCobra?]

Hear here!

Who would expect to find such accurate and useful advice and valuable admonitions regarding the legalistics of our unfortunately degrading transaction culture on this, our wonderful Cobra site?

i am regularly amazed and surprised at the depth and breadth of our collective observations, analyses and criticisms on so many significant topics, including our dear cars. My surprise could be simply a reflection of my own niggardly low and mostly disappointed expectations regarding the slow but resolute dissipation of our Anglo-American manly knowledge and honor, as reflected, if not led, by our amoral and avaricious political, legal and entertainment classes. Itself a sad commentary regarding my own mental posture.

But, i don't think my regular surprise here at CC is as a result of my own usually low expectations. Tom's question is itself an excellent commentary about both our time's mores and the various highwaymen found more regularly today within American trades and businesses and more tangentially, those behaviors of the insidious few that variously frequent our fine hobby.

Using a buyer's (or voter's) emotions to hide or obscure sure and important faults and disqualifications of a car or home (or pre-election politician) are both common and repugnant to honorable trade (or the political process). To detect serious errors in fabrication/design/sales processes (or of medical services or of public policies) by various illicit "professionals", require the use and employ of expert mechanic/inspectors (or willing and qualified doctors and political analysts) and effective independent legal advice from just lawyers and adjudicators.

Avoiding the courts is frequently very good advice. In populist cases it might exclude monstrously fabulous and erroneous settlements (think Edwards’ medical settlements here), not an error in public policy in most any case anyway, IMHO. But, private settlements, sufficient perhaps for the instance and individual, are rarely of corrective value to the public at large. Clapping 'em in irons is rarely achieved through private settlements, unless you break their bank or back, not respectively likely or legal.

So, public cases, rather than private settlements, are necessary to force legal change; which process is wisely observed by our Super Moderator J as itself controlled by other of the legal brethren acting (in the full Hollywood meaning of that word) as our various representatives, politicians and paid benefactors.

In sum, sirs, the law is an asymptote. It is an inside game of pocket-pool played by proudly amoral hired guns, drilled in both arcane minutia (i example the tax code here) and the development of special pleading exclusions (i refer to the various revenue letters), valuable detail practically available only to both their professional membership and their advantaged employers.

Yes, a few auctioneers/salesmen have been held liable and driven from the field. But, very few indeed have been adjudicated. However, as result of those few examples, the trade is today cocooned within shells and more shells of corporatised protections, insulated from real harm and justice by the fictions of obviously implausible deniability, but de facto prevention. Such a shell within a shell layering makes the Churchill’s admonition of keeping secret the code-breaking of the German Enigma rotary machine mere child’s play.

Occasionally, the sale of a single highly valuable item of perhaps mildly obscure provenance is by a single corpus formed for the occasion.

You can be assured that if and/or when the music stops on a compromised auction/sale, everyone but our intrepid buyer has a safe seat.