The courts, too, have lost much of their old distrust of claims trumped up by informers. Not only do most of them agree to confer "standing" on testers, but some award hefty damages for testers to pocket personally--destroying any possible hope that their testimony can be trusted to remain objective.
In our zeal for encouraging speculative claims, in fact, we actually manage to outdo the Roman emperors. The practice of the common informer, reports the Britan-nica, was "not without its dangers. If the delator lost his case or refused to carry it through, he was liable to the same penalties as the accused." But since our legal system sedulously resists a loser-pays principle for accusers, we avoid even this much of a prospective downside.
In his classic novel of Imperial Rome, I, Claudius, Robert Graves tells how the Emperor Caligula "began using informers to convict rich men of real or imaginary crimes, in order to get their estates....He celebrated his first batch of convictions with a particularly splendid wild-beast hunt. But the crowd was in an ugly temper. They booed and [a cry soon went up]: `Give up the informers! Give up the informers!' "
When the emperor asks the relatively popular Claudius to quiet the mob, the latter addresses them as follows: "The best policy was to do nothing which might give informers any ground for action. If everyone, I said, lived a life of the strictest virtue, the cursed breed would die out for want of nourishment, like mice in a miser's kitchen. You would never believe what a tempest of laughter this sally provoked. The simpler and sillier the joke, the better a big crowd likes it."
"If there's not discrimination, there shouldn't be any concern," New York employment lawyer Robert Lanza assured USA Today regarding the new testing initiative. Claudius, thy spirit lives on.
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