One of the reasons that The Monk supported the revolutionary and quite extensive tort reform that the Texas Legislature passed last year (commonly still known as “House Bill 4”) is that trial lawyers have a tremendous capacity to find ways to, er, protect their clients’ interests no matter how many pathways to victory, loopholes in previous laws or damage caps are put in place.
And this ingenuity is being exported from US courts to international tribunals. As James Pinkerton’s column notes, “the trial lawyers, entrepreneurial as always, have found new courts – world courts – to play in. And they have found allies among activists and fortune-hunters who dismiss traditional democracy and diplomacy in pursuit of their goals.”
Yipes.
UPDATE: for more on the Inuit lawsuit noted in Pinkerton’s column, check out Point of Law’s item noted by this site’s editor here. For those of you just tuning in, Point of Law is Overlawyered’s companion site that (as its own description states) “is a web magazine sponsored by the Manhattan Institute that brings together information and opinion on the U.S. litigation system.”
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