The New York Times Freakonomics blog, August 11, by Ethan Leib
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/friendship-and-the-law-a-guest-post/
Perversely, if you take care of your friends when they most need you, you may be disqualifying yourself from accepting their largess…. There’s a lot to say about why we don’t want the law getting too involved in our friendships. But this is a simple way to help protect friends and encourage the care they can provide for one another—and more cheaply than Medicare, to boot.