Don't Let Tort Reformers Take You For A Ride

I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, a town that personifies the term “desert oasis.” If you go for a drive during the winter in Las Vegas, you’re likely to find a lot of things on the road: Drunks, trash, automotive fluids, blown tires, and even the occasional mattress. But one thing you absolutely won’t find is salt. Our winters are mild enough that they neither need salt nor sand to stay snow and ice free. A nice benefit of living in a town that doesn’t salt the roads is that your car won’t turn into a rusted-out claptrap, no matter how many winters it endures. Even if you’ve never been to Las Vegas, you probably didn’t need me to tell you rust isn’t a problem there. Anyone with even a small measure of common sense knows that cars don’t rust in the desert.

So imagine my surprise some years ago when I was looking at buying a new car in Las Vegas and the car salesman strongly suggested I invest in the factory undercoating to protect my car from rust. When I politely declined the rust protection, the salesman patiently explained to me how expensive rust is to repair, and again suggested I save myself money by spending a little bit of money now to prevent rust, rather than paying the much higher cost later. He looked me in the eye and told me that he was truly concerned about rust forming on the car, so he offered to cut the price of the undercoating by several hundred dollars; he wasn’t trying to rip me off, he was trying to protect me!

Anyone with even a small measure of common sense knows that car salesman don’t try to protect their customers. The only problem the car salesman was trying to solve was the fact that he wasn’t making enough money. I didn’t need the rust protection package, but he needed me to buy it so he used scare tactics to try and manipulate me into buying it out of fear. I saw through his ruse and bought neither the rust protection package nor the car.

I see more than a little similarity between that car salesman and groups like the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA). The ATRA is made up of a broad spectrum of corporations, ranging from auto manufacturers to cigarette makers to petroleum refiners and pharmaceutical companies. They have little in common except for one shared problem: the civil justice system doesn’t let manufacturers get away with selling products that injure or kill consumers.

To solve their shared problem, they need legislation that makes it harder to sue manufacturers of defective products, and even harder to make them pay for the damages those products cause. Just like that car salesman, they’re first trying to scare us by making us believe that the civil justice system is driving up the costs of products and sending manufacturing jobs overseas. Then, they offer to protect us from the civil justice system by selling us tort “reform” legislation.

Use your common sense for a minute. Which is more likely: That Philip Morris (a major financer of the ATRA and the tort reform movement) wants to protect us from the civil justice system… or that Philip Morris wants us to protect them from the civil justice system?

Philip Morris, Merck, Firestone, and many of the other corporations behind the tort reform movement have repeatedly been found liable for knowingly selling defective products that have injured or killed consumers. In criminal law, there’s a term for that: repeat offenders.

What would you think if a group of criminal repeat offenders suggested “reforming” the criminal justice system by reducing prison terms and making it harder to issue arrest warrants? Anyone with even a small measure of common sense would see such “reforms” as an attempt to reduce the criminal justice system’s ability to hold criminals accountable for breaking the law.

But for some reason, when repeat civil defendants offer comparable suggestions on how to “reform” the civil justice system, those suggestions are sometimes called “common-sense” reforms!

The corporations behind the tort reform movement simply have too much to gain to be trusted with something as crucial to our democracy as the civil justice system. By their own admission, the civil justice system costs corporate defendants billions of dollars per year. With billions of dollars at stake, why wouldn’t tort reformers try and pass legislation that will let them off the hook when they break the law?

The civil justice system belongs to and benefits all of us. Any legitimate effort to reform the justice system must then involve all of us, and not just large corporations. If the ATRA truly wanted to reform the civil justice system, they would work with injured consumers, consumer advocates, and yes, even trial lawyers, to help pass legislation that ensures justice for us all. Instead, the ATRA works tirelessly to pass legislation that will deny justice to many injured consumers. And no one with even a small measure of common sense would call that “reforming” the justice system.

This article is also cross-posted to www.tortdeform.com, an excellent resource in fight to preserve and protect our civil justice system.