Yesterday's New York Times story on the lap dogs at OSHA is yet another reminder of why lawsuits are a necessary, if last ditch attempt, to keep companies at least marginally concerned about the health and safety of their workers. Note the part where companies applaud OSHA for loosening the restrictions for "handling explosives."...
Gosh, here's another reason to get rid of lawsuits against nursing homes....If the federal government won't penalize nursing homes that routinely abuse and mistreat their patients, why should private lawyers get a whack at them? The new study on the feds abysmal oversight of the nursing home industry should give anyone with aging relatives a chill.
This just in.. A group of conservative scholars has concluded definitively that not only is tort litigation a tax on every pocketbook, but it's lethal, too! Given that death or dismemberment is practically a prerequisite these days before filing a personal injury lawsuit of any value, this seems like a stretch. But the brain trust of the Pacific Research Institute concludes that exactly 114,000 people have died needlessly over the past 20 years because lawsuits have allegedly restricted access to health care and kept life-saving products off the market.
Strangely, the researchers also lament that lawsuits have hurt the economy by wiping out thousands of asbestos jobs--you know, the ones that give you and your kids lung cancer. But then again, the study's introduction is written by Mississippi governor and premiere Washington tobacco lobbyist Haley Barbour, who recently went to court and successfully defunded the nation's premiere anti-smoking program. The program had reduced smoking among Mississippi's middle school students by more than 40 percent in just a few short years. The Institute itself is funded by the cigarette industry.
Despite the obvious silliness in the Merchants of Death warning that lawsuits are lethal, I'm sure plenty of elected officials already are preparing to blandish the study in their eternal quest for "fairness" in the legal system. Blawgletter has a nice send up of the study, with links to the Wall Street Journal op-ed today touting the research...
Sorry for the blog neglect of late. Occasionally I have to do work that pays the bills, and unfortunately, blogging for Google ads just doesn't do it! To catch up, today I've got several items that have been sitting on my desk for a while, but seem interesting if not so timely at this point...
The first comes via law prof and amusement park safety expert Bill Childs. He wrote an interesting post last week on his TortsProf blog about "The Sizzler," an amusement park ride that has killed an injured some kids, including a 9-year-old in Texas who was thrown from the ride. While there's plenty of evidence to suggest that the ride is defective (particularly the restraints that should have kept the girl in her seat), the people of Texas won't be able to sue over any associated injuries, Childs writes, because the 2003 tort reform law there creates a 15-year statue of repose. So even though the Sizzler is in active use in many places, it is at least 15 years old, and thus its owners and operators are largely immune from lawsuits. Childs writes
there are dozens or hundreds of Sizzlers in operation (it is, I have read, the most popular carnival ride in existence), with the same restraint system. But due solely to its age, its manufacturer is immune from suit, and the operators will generally be effectively immune from suit. Where's the appropriate deterrence and motivation to (for instance) urge ride owners to update the restraints?
If you listen to tort reform debates long enough, you'll hear a common refrain about the tort system's "unpredictability" and "irrational jurors" who can't be trusted to put a dollar figure on corporate or medical wrongdoing. Sober legal minds like the University of Chicago's Cass Sunstein and patrician Common Good founder Philip Howard argue that decisions about the size of punitive or noneconomic damages ought to be made by experts, not average Americans on juries, maybe even using some sort of fixed schedule, to bring more order and predictability to the system.
This all sounds so reasonable and rational, until you read stories like those published in the Charleston Gazette last month about coal mine safety. Veteran coal industry reporter Ken Ward Jr. is, like me, the recipient of an Alicia Patterson fellowship, and I heard him speak about his 6-month investigation into mine safety Monday at the foundation's annual luncheon in D.C.
After sharing the gruesome details of the deaths of hundreds of coal miners in his state, Ken dropped this staggering statistic: Over the past few years, the experts in the Mine Safety and Health Administration, in their rational and predictable way, fined coal companies a whopping $250 for every miner they killed by ignoring safety regulations already on the books.
Given the scandalously low number, a shocked member of the Patterson audience wanted to know if the miners' families had sued over these preventable accidents. Ken wisely noted (with a generous plug for my book!) that in West Virginia, the workers comp system makes wrongful death lawsuits extremely difficult to win and that the coal companies basically get away with murder. But hey, the system is rational and predictable! God forbid an overly emotional jury should get a shot at say, the Sago mine operators. They might think that those 12 miners' lives were worth a little more than a high three figures.
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