Topping Torts

Campus Report ^ | October | Allie Winegar Duzett

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Topping Torts

by: Allie Winegar Duzett, October 14, 2009

When Haley Barbour was first elected governor there, he said at the recent Heritage Foundation event, Tort Reform in the States: Protecting Consumers and Enhancing Economic Growth, Mississippi was the worst place for tort abuse. The state had been dealing with bad state Supreme Court decisions, extreme lawsuit abuse, and campaigns to stop lawsuit reform. So Barbour decided to run for governor on a platform of tort reform.

This was vital, Barbour said, to getting tort reform passed at all. According to Barbour, state tort reform can never pass without the undying effort and devotion of the governor. Governors must lead the quest for reform in this area. Those who oppose tort reform—lawsuit abusers and trial lawyers—are tough and resourceful, Barbour said. They are people who have a lot invested in the current system. In fact, the governor pointed out, many Democratic candidates receive more money from trial lawyers than they do from the DNC. Both individual citizens and a national party have reasons to oppose reforms to the tort system.

Barbour discussed his own successes with tort reform: as a result of his reforms from early on in his governorship, insurance premiums have already gone down in Mississippi by approximately 60 percent. This is a huge decrease in cost, and it makes health care infinitely more affordable for those who in the past may not have had access to it. This, Barbour said, is a result any state can look forward to in return for implementing tort reforms.

Barbour believes in making tort reform a public issue. This is, in his opinion, the only way tort reform can ever pass in a state legislature: people have to understand the issue, and they have to care about it....

[Alberta's Child]

Very good article.

It's worth noting that Barbour's tort-reform crusade in Mississippi didn't gain much traction at first. It all changed when someone in the state government revealed the contents of a letter that the governor had received from an executive at Toyota Motor Corp. At the time, Toyota was considering several sites in the U.S. to manufacture light trucks. One site was in Mississippi.

The Toyota executive basically told the governor that Mississippi's legal system and civil liability climate was so bad that Toyota would buy a grain farm in Zimbabwe before they ever built an auto manufacturing facility in Mississippi. They selected San Antonio, Texas as the site of their light truck plant.

Once this story began to get a lot of media exposure, the public and political support for tort reform became insurmountable.