can establishments legally compel patrons to submit to blood testing or a breathalizer? Because that's what they'd need to do to ensure that the patron hadn't been drinking prior to entering the establishment.

I bartended in college, and the TABC course made it very clear to us that we were on the hook if we overserved someone. I think it wrong, but that's been the law in Texas for a good 15+ years.

I don't know if the drunk can sue the restaurant/server in Texas, though. The victim can, and the TABC can pull the alcohol license and/or fine the shit out of the establishment.

Didn't some guy sue a bar for refusing to serve him on the basis that the bartender was not legally competent to judge his intoxication level?

He wasn't intoxicated, but had a speech impediment.

Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't.

My solution is simple - if you are involved in an incident where your ability is impaired and you had reason to assume you were compromised, you are guilty of felony somethingorother (which depends on the harm inflicted) due to criminal negligence.

And you are not allowed to say "he should have stopped me drinking" or "they shouldn't have let me leave".

And if you don't know your level of impairment, then you can only ever get a juvenile drivers license, and the bars just have to always check for ID.

I'd be willing to be carded every time I went to the bar in exchange for humiliating the immature twats who can't control themselves.

If you can afford to drink in bars and restaurants, you can afford this:

http://www.breathalyzer.net/bactrack-select-s30.html

Fifty bucks, and you can test yourself. Of course, that means you have to take responsibility for your own actions, so I guess that doesn't fit this particular issue.

Ah, the memories. I grew up in Brick, reading the aforementioned Asbury Park Press (worst newspaper ever), routinely driving with my high school buddies down Route 37, to get to Toms River and Seaside Heights, our old stomping grounds.

And our football rivalry school? Yep! Manasquan high school!!

By the time I left the state to head for warmer weather (for Florida, in 2003), New Jersey had become chock-full of do-gooder academic elites and statist thugs who enjoyed punishing commerce and using the law as a tool of perpetual idiocy. It was a great place to grow up, but not a place I would recommend for my friends who want to have a family.

This article is prime example why. Personal responsibility is an uncomfortable topic for leftists and those looking to blame others for poor judgment. Lew Rockwell examines the topic a little further on why "criminalizing" this behavior to the Nth degree is bad for any society that strives to remain free:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/rockwell/drunkdriving.html

Don't blame the Supreme Court of New Jersey.

When New Jersey passed its "Dram Shop Act" (an act that spells out the negligence liability for bar owners who serve intoxicated customers), the legislature included two clauses in the bill that 1) excluded claims against the bar owner by the intoxicated customer, and 2) excluded claims by passengers in the customer's car who knew the customer was intoxicated. Governor Kean vetoed the bill, and issued a conditional veto stating his opposition to those two clauses. The legislature then struck the two clauses out of the bill, passed it, and sent it to the governor for signature.

Nine years later, the New Jersey legislature passed a no-fault auto insurance reform bill, which included a section stating:

a driver of a motor vehicle who is convicted of or pleads guilty to driving while intoxicated (DWI), N.J.S.A. 39:4-50(a), in connection with an accident "shall have no cause of action for recovery of economic or noneconomic loss sustained as a result of the accident."

So the question the Supreme Court of New Jersey faced was not whether it was good policy to allow drunk drivers to sue the bar owners who served them. The legislature made that decision when it passed the Dram Shop Act. The question for the Supreme Court was whether the insurance reform act repealed the parts of the Dram Shop Act that allowed intoxicated customers to sue bar owners. The Supreme Court found no evidence in the legislative history that the legislature expressly intended to repeal any part of the Dram Shop Act, so they interpreted the insurance reform act in a way that allowed the Dram Shop Act to continue unchanged.

Frankly, this is a case where the legislature and the governor adopted a bad policy. If the legislature intended to repeal part of the Dram Shop Act, it should have said so. The Supreme Court refused to fix the mess the legislature made because that's not the court's job.

There's a great quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes in the opinion:

“Of course I know and every other sensible man knows that the Sherman law is damned nonsense, but if my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I am here to help them -- it’s my job.”

Supreme Court to legislature: clean up your own damn mess.

Society has been dealing with drunkards since the first drunken idiot went and drowned himself on dry land.

I find it hard to believe we're still wrestling with this problem.

If you willingly make the decision to reduce your good judgement, and continue that decision over the course of an evening, and so get yourself drunk, you are solely responsible for any actions you commit while in that state, and are just as responsible criminally as if you had made the decision while sober.

Your mentally impaired condition was self inflicted, ergo you get no form of free pass. As far as the establishments go, it is not their job to behave as parents to any patron. That patron is already an adult, and can make or break themselves.

How are bars supposed to pick habitual drunks? Ok, if you totally write yourself off it's obvious, but I can easily fake just a bit tipsy and happy up to about 0.2% BAC or so, and even past that I can hold it together long enough to get another drink without arousing too much suspicion. For however long that tolerance lasts now that I've cut back. Laws on this are generally a joke and require the bar to do the impossible. The worst offenders are the hardest for them to spot, and it's appallingly subjective. As far as I'm concerned - my problem, not theirs. As long as I'm not causing trouble, leave me alone, and I won't hold them responsible if I walk in front of a bus on the way home.

As pooki said, the only real way to be sure would be to test people at the point of sale. But then the legislators couldn't offload the responsibility onto someone else. They would have to define an actual limit. It won't work anyway because you need 20 minutes after your last drink for mouth alcohol to dissipate so you get an accurate reading from a breathalyzer, and blood tests aren't really practical.

I used to waitress at a Fridays, and declined to move up to bartender because of the rules that they had in house. When they trained me on alcohol serving, I was told we weren't allowed to serve more than 3 drinks to anyone, and if they were a "slight female," such as Amy, no more than 2, because we couldn't be held liable if they were the ones driving.
Those limits weren't too hard to hold to when I was serving mostly food, but at the bar? Nope, no thank you, I don't want to be the one to say, "oh yeah, that guy can have one more drink than you, but then he's cut off too, even though, he's probably not even legally drunk."
When the bartenders started making less in tips than regular servers, I was not at all surprised.

Amy wrote:

So...the bartender's supposed to guess that I haven't eaten anything, and then know that after a glass and a half, I could be a danger to myself and others?

This is how the New Jersey statute fixes liability:

2A:22A-5. Conditions for recovery of damages

a. A person who sustains personal injury or property damage as a result of the negligent service of alcoholic beverages by a licensed alcoholic beverage server may recover damages from a licensed alcoholic beverage server only if:

(1) The server is deemed negligent pursuant to subsection b. of this section; and

(2) The injury or damage was proximately caused by the negligent service of alcoholic beverages; and

(3) The injury or damage was a foreseeable consequence of the negligent service of alcoholic beverages.

b. A licensed alcoholic beverage server shall be deemed to have been negligent only when the server served a visibly intoxicated person, or served a minor, under circumstances where the server knew, or reasonably should have known, that the person served was a minor.

Another section of the law defines "visibly intoxicated":

"Visibly intoxicated" means a state of intoxication accompanied by a perceptible act or series of acts which present clear signs of intoxication.

A bar owner can't be held liable merely because you had a few too many and later were caught with an illegal blood alcohol content. Instead, the plaintiff has to prove that the bar owner served you alcohol when you were visibly intoxicated-- most likely with testimony from other bar patrons that you had slurred speech, flushed complexion, unsteadiness on your feet, etc.

In my opinion, the more objectionable part of the New Jersey law is the bit I mentioned previously:

a driver of a motor vehicle who is convicted of or pleads guilty to driving while intoxicated (DWI), N.J.S.A. 39:4-50(a), in connection with an accident "shall have no cause of action for recovery of economic or noneconomic loss sustained as a result of the accident."

So even if the drunk driver drove in a completely safe manner, and the other driver involved in the accident drove recklessly and caused serious injury to the drunk driver, the drunk driver can not make any claim.

If you have had a little too much to drink, and on your way home some maniac rear-ended you, totaling your car and fracturing your spine, you can't sue him, because your blood alcohol content was too high.

That's pretty draconian.

Slight tangent here:

Turned on the radio and caught the end of what sounded like an interesting interview but I missed who. The point that I had not heard before and don't have any idea of it is correct was that prohibition and the end of it started the what became the current libertarian movement. Some whose name I forgot but was well known created it (according to this person) by splitting the existing conservatives along the alcohol issue saying that the while it is bad and people shouldn't choose to use it, the nanny state was not responsible for preventing people from making that mistake.