The Tortellini

Another Reporter Falls for the Manhattan Institute

It's always nice to see the folks over at the Manhattan Institute's Overlawyered.com touting their success at spoon-feeding some of their propaganda to willing reporters, so you know what they've been up to. It's not so nice when it turns out that the spoon-fed reporter is someone you know and like.

I cringed when I noticed an Overlawyered mash note to Mike Crowley, an editor at the New Republic and columnist at Reader's Digest, which for some reason has long been a very reliable and one-sided mouthpiece for tort reform groups.

I know Mike from my early days at the Washington Monthly, where he was once an intern. So I was pretty surprised to see the approving Overlawyered cites to several of Mike's Reader's Digest columns, especially this one, which reads like boilerplate tort reform rhetoric that could have come right off Overlawyered (and apparently, according to MI's Walter Olson, lots of the column did). A sampling:

Our society has become so sue-happy that the average federal district judge fields 400 new cases a year. With dockets so clogged with junk, it can take years for any legitimate case to wind its way through the courts. Justice delayed is justice denied.

All of these loony lawsuits hit our wallets too. Insurance premiums skyrocket as everyone scrambles to cover his behind, court costs rise, and astronomical settlements depress corporate earnings and shareholder value. According to a White House Council of Economic Advisors estimate, the United States suffers an excessive "litigation tax" of $136 billion per year. Meanwhile, the personal-injury lawyers -- whose smiling faces are plastered everywhere on ads encouraging us to join the lawsuit parade -- are laughing all the way to the bank.

For those unfamiliar with the Manhattan Institute, the think tank's center for legal policy is funded by insurance and tobacco companies (AIG's former head Hank Greenberg has been a stalwart donor). It's primary mission is to mold reporters into a "pro-tort reform" position, providing an "intellectual" foundation for the corporate tort reform movement's self-serving legislative goals.

I write more about this in my book, but an early fundraising letter sent out by Manhattan Institute president William Hammett actually named many of the reporters it was targeting, and they tended to be folks at magazines like TNR (though back then it was Michael Kinsley and Fred Barnes they were after). Hammett explained the group's research mission to potential donors, saying, "Journalists need copy, and it's an established fact that over time they'll 'bend' in the direction in which it flows." 

As a result, the MI makes it really, really easy for reporters to write stories bashing the legal system, trial lawyers and juries, without having to make too many phone calls.  Unfortunately, like the Reader's Digest pieces, those stories not only serve a bigger corporate agenda, but they give the public a pretty miserably skewed view of what really happens in the legal system. Oh, Mike...

Illinois Takes Another Beating

Today the conservative Manhattan Institute released the latest in its line of "Trial Lawyers, Inc." reports, this time focusing on the state of Illinois. The study is full of the usual scary--and dubious--numbers from compromised sources about the ever-increasing size of the "litigation industry" and all those itinerant doctors fleeing the state in search of happier legal climates.

The MI report will no doubt be effectively deployed by the big companies that helped make the Illinois  2004 judicial races the most expensive in American history (read more about that election here) and which are gearing up for another round in November.  No surprise, but some of the Manhattan Institute's biggest funders are the same companies that occasionally get whacked in Illinois courts, including Philip Morris, the victim of a recently overturned $10 billion verdict in Madison County.

The Doctors Aren't Disappearing, but the Lawsuits Might Be...

One interesting item from the MI study: Since George W. Bush signed the Class Action Fairness Act in 2005, the number of class actions filed in the famous Madison County "judicial hellhole" has plummeted. After seeing more than 100 in 2003, this year, according to the MI, Madison County has had but one. This news does beg the question: If all the lawsuits are disappearing, how can "Trial Lawyers, Inc." be growing exponentially, as the researchers claim?