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Title: Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue
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Manufacturer: Free Press
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| Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press Eye-opening treatment of an important issue | This important book should have received more attention when it was published. Presumably, "tort reform" is just not a sexy enough topic, and even the bright yellow cover and the (presumably intentional) absence of the word "tort" from the title were insufficient.
Avoiding legalese almost completely, Mencimer gives an in-depth account of the lobbying and litigation wars over the civil justice system in the past two decades or so. Unlike other commentators, I didn't find this book an unquestioning brief for the trial lawyers. Mencimer makes clear that some trial lawyers can become extraordinarily wealthy and that some baseless and even frivolous suits are filed. Her real point is that some major companies have tried to achieve in the halls of Congress and the state legislatures and in the ballot box what they could not achieve in court.
The story of the McDonald's coffee lawsuit has been told elsewhere, but Mencimer goes well beyond this to point out other distortions of the truth that have been made by lobbyists for insurance and other industries.
| | Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press An Eye-Opener! | All of us have heard stories about how the legal system has run amok via multi-million lawsuits over trivial incidents - eg. spilt coffee at McDonald's nets $3 million. Meanwhile, the media and politicians also bring stories of medical cost escalation, and product/service withdrawal due to high liability costs. Something has to be done!
Fortunately, "Blocking the Courthouse Door" was written to provide important missing details. Mencimer reviews each of the "outrageous cases," showing how key details had been omitted - eg. the extent of harm, the frequency with which it had occurred previously, how the award had been scaled back, etc. Suddenly the cases are no longer outrageous!
Then the book moves on to aggregate data and reveals that, contrary to popular opinion, the frequency and size of suits have been declining; meanwhile, media coverage has increased.
Why the "litigation crisis" myth? The movement is an alliance of insurance companies, corporate interests (eg. tobacco and asbestos companies), and political operatives. (The latter group is mostly Republicans, seeing the issue as an opportunity to increase donations from physicians and the involved industries, as well as to squeeze attorneys - a large source of Democratic donations.) Not only are industries concerned about potential lawsuit awards, but also the bad publicity - eg. the public learning how Ford had callously evaluated the cost/benefit of a $5 investment/car to reduce Pinto gas-tank fires.
We also learn that issue-ads on the topic are not only intended to sway voters, but jurors as well. Jurors that have seen at least one ad on the "litigation crisis" have been found less likely to make large awards.
An excellent eye-opener! | | Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press Strong | | This book presents a very strong argument for the view that the chamber of commerce and the GOP have been working systematically to dismantle the civil justice system. It's very dense with facts and, best of all, features original reporting by the author. | | Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press How Can Something be so Right and then so Wrong? | For the most part, I agree with the premise of this book: That what republicans are billing as tort reform is a bad idea. One that will cost the average American dearly and reap hefty profits for big business. Corporations, now able to determine their exposure to litigation, can be free to market any product, no matter how dangerous, knowing that there will be a cap on their punitive damages. The American public becomes a guinea pig to corporate irresponsibility. Not a good picture!
That said, as I read this book, I found myself going from unabashed contempt at the behavior of some big business defendants in their attempts to discredit their plaintiff's cases and obtain a 'free break' from liability to incredulity at some of what she was calling 'legitimate lawsuits'. Much of my problem with this book was what I felt I wasn't being told. A woman was abducted from a Wal-Mart parking lot and subsequently raped. She sues Wal-Mart for not having sufficient security to prevent the incident. We are never told if Wal-Mart had any security in effect at the time nor what the legal requirements on the retailer were for providing such security. Don't you think that is relevant to the legitimacy of her case?
A man goes to a doctor's office to have a mole removed. The doctor performs the procedure and leaves him in the room for a period of time said to be 'long'. He falls off the table he was laying on and breaks his neck. He sues the doctor for his injury. How long was he left to wait? Might that be important? I believe that when doctor's aren't in the room with you they are doing this thing we call 'seeing other patients'. In fact, when they are in the room with you, there are actually other patients in other rooms left waiting. Do we have any information that the doctor was indeed negligent in this incident? Was he off playing video games or talking to his golf buddy while his patients were left in limbo? I guess we are supposed to assume so but are never really told such details.
Even when she was on the money, as in the AHP marketing of the fen-phen diet supplement, we see huge punitive awards given to a relatively small number of litigants while we are informed that around 6 million people were affected by this drug. What happens to them? I actually know the answer to this one because I happen to personally know one of them. She got a $15,000 settlement from a class action suit against AHP, which, after the lawyers took their part, came out to just around $10,000. So a half-dozen people got to live in mansions and drive fancy cars while 6 million either went without recompense or got a pittance if they were lucky enough to join the class-action suit! Sounds fair to me!
And here is a great statistical quote from page 255 of the book: "The Rand study found that only one out of every ten Americans injured in accidents pursue compensation for it, and of those, only two actually file a lawsuit." So only 2 of those 1 out of 10 go to court! Interesting! In the end, the author does reveal her true motives. That is, a European style governance complete with universal health benefits and disability to 'take the big money out of personal injury'. Well why didn't she just say that in the first place?
At different points reading this book I wanted to give it 5 stars, and, at others, 1 star. The trouble I had was that I felt it did more to legitimize 'tort reform' than to attack it because the cases presented could equally be taken in the other direction and any intelligent reader would be able to see that. True tort reform, in my opinion, would involve working toward a more consistent way of interpreting the law and assessing damages. I gave it 2 stars because I felt that there was a reasonable amount of valuable information about the corporate influence on the republican party. I would recommend reading it for that reason alone. Just be wary of the information you are not being told. | | Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press Depends on who you are | If you are a plaintiff's attorney or really really stupid this book will appeal to you. It is a self-serving collection of lies, micharacterizations, and falsehoods financed by the ATLA in hopes that gullible voters will take their word for everything that is said. Similar to any Michael Moore film, this book puts its hands over its ears and screams CORPORATIONS, CORPORATIONS, CORPORATIONS!!! at the top of its lungs, expecting that the average reader will agree with its communist leanings and denounce the pigs who place safety before profits.
All in all, a waste of time and money. | | Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies Are Taking Away Your Right to Sue by Free Press Product Description | | Thanks to constant political oratory against "frivolous lawsuits" and "jackpot justice," it is widely known that there's a legal crisis in this country. President Bush never misses an opportunity to call for laws that would bring more "common sense" to a legal system that, he claims, is out of control, wrecking the economy, driving doctors out of their practices, bankrupting small businesses, and costing American jobs. Journalists repeat the charges without examining them. As a result, the lawsuit issue has moved to the political front burner, and in the past three years, state after state has responded by limiting citizens' rights to sue. Just this year alone, the Republicanled Congress has passed restrictions on class action lawsuits and is steps away from enacting limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. But is there really a crisis? National data show that the number of civil suits is falling, not rising, and that the average damage award is also going down. Despite intense media hype to the contrary, the number of personal injury lawsuits filed every year has been tumbling for the past decade. Upon closer examination, the stories of ridiculous lawsuits usually turn out to be false or badly misleading. The crisis, in short, appears to be a phantom. So how do we explain the scary headlines? Who's behind the "tort reform movement," and what are the real goals? Blocking the Courthouse Door will show that the movement against so-called greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible plaintiffs is the result of a concerted and successful campaign by large corporations to get this issue on the table and thus limit their own vulnerability in the civil justice system. They have spent decades, and many millions of dollars, on focus groups and Madison Avenue public relations research. They have funded institutes, sponsored academic research, bankrolled politicians, set up phony "astroturf " grassroots organizations (with chamber of commerce return addresses), and fed copy to all-too-gullible journalists. For corporations, the self-interest involved is fairly plain. Tobacco companies, no longer able to dodge the bullet of liability for knowingly selling poisons, are making an end run around the civil justice system. If they can't win a class action suit, they'll make suing itself illegal. Insurance companies, drowning in red ink from mismanagement and bad investments in the bond market, hike insurance rates by huge sums and blame malpractice suits. The doctors in turn blame greedy lawyers -- and their own injured patients. And for Republicans, the campaign provides an extra bonus: defunding the Democratic Party. Limits on lawsuits cut into the income of some of the Democratic Party's most generous donors, the trial lawyers, who are often the only source of campaign cash for Democrats in many states. By exposing some of the dubious characters, corporate chicanery, skewed research, fudged numbers, and bogus journalism that have buttressed the calls for lawsuit reform,Stephanie Mencimer shows who's behind the movement to close the courthouse doors, and how they've successfully persuaded millions of Americans to give up their critical legal rights without fully understanding what they're losing -- often until it's too late. |
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