WHEN CORPORATIONS ATTACK AMERICA’S CIVIL JUSTICE SYSTEM
Over the years, it has become clear that those trying to destroy the civil justice system will do almost anything to accomplish their misguided goal. Corporations have spent millions funding groups to peddle junk studies and fabricate statistics and figures designed to undermine the people’s confidence in our legal system, its courts, judges, juries and lawyers. Unfortunately, there are too many corporations attempting to stack the deck against everyday Americans so they can increase their profits by avoiding accountability for their negligence.
One such group is California-based Pacific Research Institute. Like other tort reform groups, PRI is funded by tobacco, oil, and drug corporations, all wanting to ensure people have no legal recourse when harmed by their misconduct.
When PRI issued its annual “state tort index and rankings,” MTLA knew something was “fishy”. How can one put a price on a legal system, or rank the various states’ legal systems? Well, an analysis issued this month by three leading law professors “blows” PRI’s arguments right out of the water.
Tom Baker of University of Pennsylvania Law School, Herbert Kritzer of William Mitchell College of Law, and Neil Vidmar of Duke Law School authored, “Jackpot Justice and the American Tort System: Thinking Beyond Junk Science.” This is a scholarly work I highly recommend reading as it sheds much-needed light on the intellectual dishonesty of these tort reform groups.
The professors levied multiple criticisms on PRI, calling their report “advocacy disguised as science,” “pure fiction,” “lack[ing] scientific merit,” and containing “highly dubious extrapolations.” PRI’s claim that families are somehow paying a “tax” for the civil justice system is also exposed - its origins are from a discredited study by insurance consultant Tillinghast Towers Perrin. In the sea of highly dubious numbers flowing through the report, the law professors concluded that, “Not one of the numbers included in the table of tort costs in the report comes from a ‘prestigious academic publication’ or was subject to peer review by independent experts.”
The heavy criticism levied upon PRI’s authors does not just speak to this one report, but is an indictment of the corporations and the front groups they have created to try to chip away at the civil justice system. For years, these phony think tanks and “academic institutions” have relied upon silly anecdotes, fuzzy math, and a slew of other disingenuous tactics to plant a solution for a problem that never existed.
Look no further than Maryland’s so-called Medical Malpractice Crisis of 2004, a local example of how fuzzy math and anecdotes were used to attach a non-existent problem of the legal system. During 2004, Annapolis was inundated with dubious studies, reports and projections selling the “snake oil” of tort reform. The result was a special session of the Maryland General Assembly which produced a bill leading to the transfer of over $84,000,000 in state taxpayer money to Maryland’s largest physician liability insurer.
However, by 2007, the projections of doom and gloom were convincingly proven to be patently untrue. The insurer was so profitable it announced plans to issue a $68,000,000 dividend to its physicians. This prompted Maryland’s then new Insurance Commissioner, Ralph S. Tyler, to intervene causing the insurer to refund the $84,000,000 in taxpayer money back to the state and issue physicians nearly $14,000,000 in credits against future malpractice premiums.
The analysis by the three law professors debunks just one report in an ocean of misinformation. But it illustrates how truth is on the side of the civil justice system, and now more than ever, we are fighting back against those seeking to undermine it.
