The law in NM requires that servers be trained in spotting drunk behavior and that they have knowledge in how many drinks a person of x size/weight can have per hour not exceed limits and the law holds that if a server continues to sell drinks to a drunk person, they can be held (to some degree) responsible for later DWI accidents. Drunk folks often don't know they are drunk or recognize how impaired they are. To keep selling them alcohol is improper and very easy to do. Drunks are high profit margin customers.
Trash law should not inform/contribute to the generation of more trash law.
People at varying levels of intoxication behave very differently to each other. Not every venue can reasonably keep track of what their customers drink, especially if they buy for each other. Finally, you do not need very much alcohol in your system to be a much higher risk to others than normal while driving, or to have impaired judgment. Someone having 3-5 drinks is already there. Blaming a bartender because a person who willingly purchases and consumes alcohol didn't know their limits is, in fact, a false attribution of cause. An unrealistic and unfair standard.
It's part of the deal when it comes to serving alcohol. Technically, a drunk person cannot consent to purchasing more liquor, no more than they can sign a mortgage. Society struggles on how to apportion responsibility but "handing someone alcohol" is an intervention that's causal.
Ah yes, this is also the scenario where two people get drunk and you get a "Shrodinger's rape", where by that rationale the person is both raping and being raped, at the same time, because they're drunk and can't consent.
Or...we could hold people responsible for what they do when the willingly consume drugs, and not falsely assign cause to someone else for the person's poor judgment.
Even rate of drinking will influence how drunk someone gets. In college, I could easily have 8+ drinks in one night. But if I attempted to have 5 in 30 minutes, it wouldn't end well. I was fortunate enough to learn that lesson by watching someone else do it. I would be a non-trivial risk to kill people if behind a wheel at like, 2-3 drinks. I even tested that by playing Madden while drunk and noting the deficiency in my user control of a defender compared to normal. This is not a reasonable thing to place on the seller.
You should probably watch more Legal Eagle. The fact that you're questioning this means that whatever basal assumptions about how the law 'should' work entirely disagrees with qualified judges and Common Law throughout much of the developed world. In this instance, you're just wrong. That means that your foundation is faulty. This is your Dunning-Kruger moment.
Do not confuse my position on what law should be with my understanding of what law is. My understanding of law is obviously incomplete, but my discussion in this thread is also about *shouldness*, not just what the law is.
There are a lot of bullcrap laws. Obscenity law, civil forfeiture law, arbitrary bans on random gun part laws, family law/court, and yes, laws that falsely attribute cause to someone rather than assigning responsibility to the bad actor(s) are examples. These range from badly constructed, to flat out dishonest/awful (civil forfeiture objectively violates due process and legalizes banditry, but SCOTUS didn't care. I also wouldn't care if people started treating acts of banditry as banditry in response).
The lawyers I do watch on occasion on YouTube are less meme-tier.
