Freedom and Tort Reform Ending lawsuit abuse in America is about more than just trial lawyers and big business.
The mainstream media in this country has done a great disservice to the citizens of America and failed in its responsibility to accurately report the issue at stake for this country in regard to what is called “tort reform.” The reporting on this subject is always about trial lawyers, corporations, Republicans and Democrats and campaign contributions. What we have lost in the debate about lawsuit abuse is a discussion about freedom and self-government.
The American experiment in self-government goes far beyond simply the right to vote for elected representatives who then serve the people. Under our system, individuals are provided extraordinary freedom to make decisions about how to conduct their own lives. The individual primarily decides how he or she will earn a living, what they will make and sell, and how they will choose to spend the money they earn. Over the course of a day, almost 200,000 million adults each make as many as six important economic decisions a day: Where to go to work, where to buy food, what transportation to use, what products to purchase for future use, etc. Conservatively, over 1 billion important economic decisions a day are made by individuals acting in what they believe to be in their own best interest.
The civil justice system in America is supposed to help bring order, predictability, fairness and guidance to individuals as they make individual choices. For example, an unscrupulous individual may believe it is in his own best interest to sell a chair he knows to be defective. The civil justice system tells him it is not in his own best interest to do that because he will not only have to pay the money back for the chair, but also pay for any damages the chair caused and quite possibly a fine. At the same time, the civil justice system provides an individual with the needed confidence to purchase a chair from a person or corporation they know little or nothing about because the buyer knows she has the civil justice system as an insurance against wrongful damage done to her by the chair.
When individuals, however, seek to exploit the civil justice system itself for personal gain, they create a threat to freedom. The rules that result from the civil justice system provide signals to citizens about what is proper and beneficial behavior. If a bad ruling caused by an unscrupulous individual seeking an unwarranted or excessive award or protection perverts the civil justice system itself, then all individual choices, which rely upon this decision, are perverted as well. A free society does not function as well as it did before.
Suppose a greedy trial lawyer convinces an individual to “go after” the chair manufacturer. But in this case, the chair manufacturer produced a reasonable, and safe chair. But the children kept jumping on it or otherwise put it through abnormal use, thus rendering he chair unsafe. If the trial lawyer does not care about the abuse the chair took, and instead sues for millions of dollars and holds the manufacturer accountable for not making an “abuse-safe” chair, we all suffer if the trial lawyer gets his millions. The chair manufacturer must now make much more expensive chairs or else risk going out of business in the next lawsuit. The rest of us are forced to pay more for our chairs, even though our children don’t jump on the furniture. We now have less money to spend on other goods we’d like to buy for our relatively well-behaved children. Freedom suffers.
Unfortunately, that is what has been happening for years in our civil justice system. An elite group of greedy trial lawyers are exploiting the legal system for their own gain. The balance has tilted too far and all of us pay more for goods then we need to and have fewer products to choose from due to manufacturer fear of exploitative lawsuits.
This is why we need civil justice reform in this country; to restore the proper balance and confidence in the system. Fewer and fewer Americans view the civil justice system as fair and just. A recent poll commissioned by the Institute for Legal Reform found that 67% of Americans believe that lawyers benefit most from the current class action lawsuit system. The system was not intended to benefit lawyers, and yet 2/3 of Americans believe that is exactly who benefits most from the current class action lawsuit system. Undoubtedly, these two-thirds of Americans make decisions everyday – consciously or subconsciously – based on this lack of confidence in the civil justice system. That is bad for freedom. That is bad for economic prosperity and the pursuit of happiness. And, finally, it is bad for our great experiment in self-government
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