Stop Tort Reform: The Social Necessity of Our Civil Justice System

Throughout this website we stress, It's About Taking Responsibility. We submit to you that each individual American's ability to bring a lawsuit, and thereby force another individual or corporation to take responsibility for their actions, is the single most important individual liberty created by our Constitution. If someone is trying to persuade you that the discretion of a jury to decide the rights of parties to a lawsuit should be restricted, or that your right to access the courts should somehow be limited, stop and consider the source carefully.

We hear a lot these days about so called tort “reformers”, those politicians who claim that our system of trial by jury is flawed and inadequate. They assert that we should somehow limit the individual American's Constitutional right to access to the courts, because “juries can't be trusted” so they say.

Keep in mind when you read and hear this rhetoric that juries are made up of people like you and me. When the framers of our Constitution chose this system of balance, they recognized that juries - made up of everyday men and women from our society, and randomly chosen to serve - cannot be corrupted by outside influence like other decision-makers in the other branches of our government.

That is why politicians who support gigantic profit makers and the insurance industry hate juries - because they have no power over juries. They cannot control a jury, so they want to scare us into believing that we should take away the discretion of a jury. These politicians, and the industry they represent, fear the prospect of having to face the consequences of a jury trial because they cannot influence the outcome. Jury trials are the purist form of justice.

Think about this: isn't it funny how the very same politicians who solicit our help in getting them elected don't trust us to sit on a jury and determine the liability of a defendant? Under that logic, we can be trusted to vote for them, but we can't be trusted to decide the fate of their constituents.

Don't believe everything you hear from politicians on this issue of tort “reform”, but instead think critically about what you are being told. Many struggling countries are fighting to put in place a system of government like ours where the individual retains control, and where safeguards are in place to protect the individual from the tyranny and injustice of government and powerful corporate interests that are motivated only by making a profit. Regrettably, in this country, we seem to be focused upon finding something wrong with our system of justice. The old adage is applicable here: if it isn't broken, don't fix it.

A lawsuit gives an individual the power to single-handedly take on a wrongdoer – no matter how powerful and how well connected that wrongdoer may be. There is no better demonstration of the need for the individual consumer to have the power of a lawsuit than the deadly product sold to consumers containing Ephedra. On December 30, 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally decided to ban dietary supplements containing Ephedra, used as weight loss aids. Unfortunately, in the time it took the FDA to act, there have been over 16,000 horrible adverse reactions to this diet-aid, including strokes and heart attacks. The FDA also reports as many as 155 deaths caused by supplements containing Ephedra. Yet the FDA is only going to be as aggressive as the forces setting policy in Washington allow them to be. You see, the herbal supplements lobby is a powerful influence in Washington, funded by many huge corporations that manufacture and distribute diet-aids containing Ephedra.

In the meantime, countless lives are lost. Despite all the reports of injuries and death, it is estimated that the profits of Ephedra sales since 2000 have exceeded 4 billion dollars, according to the National Business Journal. While the FDA is gridlocked, and the herbal supplements industry is making billions of dollars by placing a product into commerce that is killing people, consumers are virtually powerless to stop this reckless behavior – if it was not for the civil justice system. The reality is that the only leverage you and I have readily available to us to get the attention of the herbal products industry about the dangers of their product is a lawsuit – where a Samson can still take on a Goliath.

It works. Due to mounting liability created by individual civil cases filed against the manufacturers of these products, companies like Metabolife were forced to stop selling ephedra-containing products, and retailers like GNC and Twinlab Corp. were forced to stop selling ephedra products, long before the FDA ban was implemented.

The Ephedra debacle demonstrates single-handedly the social value of lawsuits and monetary compensation when products injure or kill people because of a failure to consider the safety of the consumer over profits. It is not altruism or regulation, but rather the specter of liability—the risk of large awards of damages and the publication of damning evidence—that is forcing the diet-aid industry to take responsibility for their products, to take bad products off the market, to henceforth make safe herbal supplements and pharmaceuticals, and to not cut corners in the testing of its products just to make a profit. There are plenty of other examples of the power of our civil justice system to curb corporate greed: Firestone tires, Enron, WorldCom, the Asbestos industry, Silicone Breast Implants, the manufacturer of Phen-fen diet pharmaceuticals, and the list goes on.

Hopefully they have learned ...
 

... It's About Taking Responsibility.