The New York Times quotes my testimony to the hearing on H.R. 847.
Unfortunately, the story incorrectly refers to AEI as a “lobbying organization,” which it is definitively not. It is unimaginable how the Times could have made this mistake, given that just three weeks ago, they had to correct an identical mistake; the senior editor has promised me a correction.
Today I testified before the Senate Republican Conference about the effect on the economy of excessive litigation. A podcast is available on-line and, for the insomniacs among you, the hearing will be broadcast on C-SPAN tonight at 10:56 PM Eastern and again at 2:09 AM Eastern. Also testifying was Life Without Lawyers author Philip Howard; Crystal Chodes, who lost her job because of the expense of a meritless ADA filing mill suit; Texas doctor David Teuscher; and arbitration expert and University of Kansas law professor Christopher Drahozal.
If you just prefer reading what I have to say, my written testimony is on-line also:
The total loss to the economy from excessive tort litigation above and beyond a baseline of an employment at will regime and an average industrialized tort system can be estimated at between over $600 billion and over $900 billion a year, 4.3% to 6.5% of GNP, or a tort tax of between $8,000 and $12,000/year for an average family of four. And this is very much a conservative estimate, as other economists find much stronger effects than I have estimated here, as I have not tried to estimate a number of identifiable secondary and tertiary effects of excessive tort litigation on allocation of economic resources, and as I have not tried to estimate the likely effect of recent Congressional expansions of tort liability in the last twelve months.
I was pleased to hear from multiple Congressional staffers who are regular Overlawyered readers: one even surreptitiously added the website into my official biography. Carter Wood talks about the hearing and Senator Cornyn’s remarks over at Point of Law.
Update: video on-line at C-SPAN; my segment begins at 43:15 or so. And C-SPAN2 is rebroadcasting at 4:16 pm Eastern on Tuesday, March 17, which suggests that my appearance will be at about 5 pm Eastern.
At the indispensable American.com, I find some similarities between Patrick Leahy’s proposal and a fiasco of a publicity stunt 75 years ago.
Inside Counsel magazine’s March 2009 issue quotes me (and mentions this blog) in a story about punitive damages and a Third Circuit ruling imposing a 1-to-1 limit on punitive damages in a bad-faith-failure-to-settle case, Jurinko v. Medical Protective Co. (albeit in a mysteriously unpublished decision). (Lauren Williamson, “Court Imposes 1-to-1 Punitive Damages Ratio”, Inside Counsel, March 2009; see also Shannon P. Duffy, “3rd Circuit Slashes Punitives, Imposes 1-1 Ratio”, Legal Intelligencer, Dec. 30.) I do take issue with the line “The decision continues a trend of appeals courts beginning to rein in punitive damage awards when there is no physical injury or ‘reprehensible’ behavior.” A 1-to-1 ratio isn’t “reining in” punitive damages awards in such cases, because just a generation ago, the ratio for such situations was zero-to-one, because punitive damages were to be limited to intentional or particularly reprehensible conduct. As I feared a few months ago, the 1-to-1 ratio “ceiling” the Supreme Court suggested in Exxon Shipping v. Baker has become a benchmark.
The magazine also has a short interview with Andrew Frey, the Mayer Brown litigator who has argued several Supreme Court punitive damages cases.
Well, I have to be encouraged that, when confronted with my argument against civil Gideon, this was the best the Drum Major Institute could come up with to respond (it doesn’t quite rise to the level of a rebuttal). Compare and contrast the arguments I actually made–and the reasoning given for my conclusions–with the characterizations in the DMI report, and then ask yourself why one of organizations leading the fight for civil Gideon doesn’t dare engage those arguments.
Yesterday the Manhattan Institute unveiled a new study by my colleague there, Senior Fellow Marie Gryphon, entitled “Greater Justice, Lower Cost: How a ‘Loser Pays’ Rule Would Improve the American Legal System” (podcast; Pajamas TV video). It’s got an introduction by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose endorsement of the idea all by itself counts as a welcome news story, I think. I was part of the panel discussion held to welcome the paper, along with Philip Howard of Common Good, Ted Frank of AEI (and this site), and NYU law professor Mark Geistfeld. Some coverage of and reactions to the study: ABA Journal, AmLaw Litigation Daily, Quin Hillyer @ Washington Examiner, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Legal NewsLine, Jane Genova, and Jim Copland and Michael Krauss at Point of Law.
I’m scheduled to discuss the eHarmony settlement and litigation between 3 and 3:30 Central on the PrimeTime Chicago show on WMBI Friday.
The latest issue of the Federalist Society’s Class Action Watch has many articles of interest to Overlawyered readers:
Ohio State Law professor Sarah Cole and I have a piece in the Fall issue of Dispute Resolution analyzing the empirical data over consumer arbitration–especially the claims made by Public Citizen about it.