At the end of the day, who is it that gives out the money here? Why do the liability insurance companies pay? Is it because somebody with a bodily injury or property damage has a lawyer? Or is it that a JURY might decide to give away the store. Stossel does nothing but shoot the messenger here. Juries decide how much compensation to award for an injury, not the lawyers.
So the tort system is based upon individual responsibility. You pay compensation where your own wrongful conduct has caused harm. Members of the community decide if your conduct was substandard and how much you should pay.
What do you propose to replace the tort system? Broad immunity for obstetrics, swimming holes and dangerous machines. Then all you will have is injured people becomming ward of and dependent upon public assistance. Why is that a good thing?
Lawyers make the laws and choose the juries. Pretty convenient, huh?
.....Why is that a good thing?.....
You avoid the issue by attempting to defend an system gone rogue.
American law assumes that ever person must act with Christ like perfection. If that degree of perfection as measured by the ruler of the tort lawyer is not achieved, then money damages are due to the injured party.
The lawyer knows there is no perfection and that his ruler and the court is merely a tool for personal enrichment
As a practicing attorney for over 30 years, I can tell you there is very little wrong with the tort system as it existed in the 1960s. Since then the system has been rigged to permit spurious class actions, non-scientific or pseudo-scientific evidence and a general diminishing between the rule of causal connection between the alleged tort and the harm. Additionally, most companies are able to be sued in multiple jurisdictions. This allows the tort lawyer to select a jurisdiction (usually urban areas) where judges and juries are prone to awarding huge verdicts.
The tort system was originally designed to compensate victims for losses caused by the negligence of another. Activist courts, over the last 40 years, have determined that the system could also be used to enhance consumer safety. The theory is that rather than merely compensating a victim for his or her loss, the system should also be used to force a manufacturer to modify its product to make it more safe. This goal is responsible for many of the abuses and problems we see today in the tort system.
“What do you propose to replace the tort system? Broad immunity for obstetrics, swimming holes and dangerous machines. Then all you will have is injured people becomming ward of and dependent upon public assistance. Why is that a good thing?”
This would be OK if Judges would do their part instead of being part of the problem. The Judge can throw out a case with prejudice and eliminate the problem of jury shopping. If I hear one more attorney tell me his poor client deserves money from the State because he is in a wheelchair I will puke. The people I hear this from usually had a blood ethanol approaching O.3 and ran off the road at high speed. Sure it’s the States fault and since we must assign percentage of fault I assign 100% to the fool drinking and driving. I don’t think I (taxpayer)owe a drunk anything.
If the shoe fits......
Are you a tort lawyer? Are you acquainted with tort lawyers? Do you know what a strike suit is? It’s a species of nuisance suit, and it is brought by plaintiffs’ attorneys in this way: they find somebody who has a colorable claim to a possible injury, but on a claim that will involve a lot of very expensive discovery before you even get to trial (expensive, that is, on the part of the defendant, who will be compelled to pay for hundreds or thousands of man-hours to scour its records, review the documents, and then make copy-sets to send to the plaintiffs’ attorney; the plaintiffs’ attorney’s main cost - unless the defendant enough gumption to fight - is the cost of replacing the toner cartridge in his or her printer). The plaintiffs’ attorney then files suit, and starts offering a “settlement” that is just under the net present value of what the defendant would otherwise have to pay in discovery and other pre-trial costs. Of course, the plaintiffs’ attorney typically keeps 30% or so - after deduction of all litigation-related costs and other overhead costs, such as paper and the attorneys’ secretary.
This gets supercharged if the plaintiffs’ attorney manages to score a potential class-action suit, in which the potential discovery costs skyrocket.
At the end of the day, typically, in a class-action strike suit, the members of the class - most of whom have no idea that they were members of the class, in large part because most of us don’t go around scouring the legal notices section of the various “newspapers of record” to see if there are any class action notices that might cover us - will recover pennies, if that, on the dollar, and the plaintiffs’ attorneys will walk away very rich men.
And all of that before we even get to the issue of utterly meaningless standards of compensable injury that allow willful, tainted juries to give away the store.
What should the current state of affairs be replaced with? For starters, let’s get rid of contingency fees - if a plaintiff is too poor to pay fees, or the claim is too small to support the fees the attorney will charge, then the case is perfect for a pro-bono or low-income clinic, of which there are scads (and which would be more available to handle real plaintiffs with real injuries who need pro-bono or low-cost representation if they were prevented from pursuing the leftists’ version of the strike-suit - the politically-motivated class action). There are very, very good reasons why champerty was (and technically still is in many states) illegal, and the typical contingency fee arrangement has become more or less as fraught with abuse, or the potential for abuse, as the circumstances in which the rules against champerty originated. As such, contingency fee arrangements should simply be made illegal, period, because they too often constitute nothing more than old-fashioned champerty.
That should be a good starting point. We’ll put that into place, and then see how things shake out once the changes have had time to filter through the whole system, and we can then re-assess what else might need changing.