The Myth of America's 'Lawsuit Crisis'

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http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20082/

 

The Myth of America's 'Lawsuit Crisis'

By Stephanie Mencimer, Washington Monthly

Posted on October 5, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/20082/

 

Last December, Newsweek featured a cover package by Stuart Taylor and

Evan Thomas that blared: " Lawsuit Hell: Doctors. Teachers. Coaches.

Ministers. They all share a common fear: being sued on the job. "

Paired with a weeklong tie-in on NBC News and online chats on

MSNBC.com, the article claimed that because " Americans will sue each

other at the slightest provocation, " the country is suffering from an

" onslaught of litigation " that costs Americans $200 billion a year.

The story was full of tales claiming to illustrate Americans'

overarching sense of legal entitlement and desire to " win a jackpot

from a system that allows sympathetic juries to award plaintiffs not

just real damages…but millions more for the impossible-to-measure

'pain and suffering' and highly arbitrary 'punitive damages.' "

 

Among others, the story featured a softball tournament organizer, a

minister, and a doctor who all claimed to have modified their behavior

because they were terrified of lawsuits. Ryan Warner, an insurance

salesman in Page, Ariz., told Newsweek that he had recently cancelled

an annual charity softball tournament because an injured player had

sued the city of Page for $100,000. Warner said that he worried he

might be added as a defendant.

 

The story as published, though, lacks a few critical details. Newsweek

didn't mention, for instance, that the 1997 federal Volunteer

Protection Act ensures that people like Warner are immunized from

these types of lawsuits. The article also excluded the injured man,

Richard Sawyer, a locomotive engineer who suffered a dislocated ankle

and a spiral fracture to the fibula – and missed months of work as a

result – after he slid into a base that was supposed to break away on

impact but didn't because the city hadn't followed the manufacturer's

instructions for maintaining these fixtures properly, according to

Kevin Garrison, Sawyer's lawyer.

 

The event organizers had insurance – required by the city – to protect

against exactly this kind of situation, but Warner cancelled the

tournament anyway because he says the lawsuit was " a hassle. "

Canceling the tournament proved a smart PR move, as it brought out an

immense amount of pressure on Sawyer to drop his suit, says Garrison.

The case was settled this January for an undisclosed amount and Warner

was never named. In fact, the tournament has been revived and

scheduled for early September.

 

Not only were the particulars of the Newsweek story misleading. The

essence of the story was wrong, too. Newsweek's " onslaught " of

lawsuits simply hasn't happened. According to the National Center for

State Courts, a research group funded by state courts, personal injury

and other tort filings, when controlled for population growth, have

declined nationally by 8 percent since the 1975, and have been falling

steadily in real numbers since 1996. The numbers are even more

dramatic in places with rapid population growth, like Texas, where the

rate of tort filings fell 37 percent between 1990 and 2000. Even in

liberal California, the rate of filings has plummeted 45 percent over

the past decade. And those overly sympathetic juries Newsweek derides

as so eager to dole out big bucks to injured victims?

 

In 2001, they voted against plaintiffs in 75 percent of all medical

malpractice trials, according to the federal government's Bureau of

Justice Statistics (BJS).

 

In an interview, Taylor dismisses these numbers as insignificant

compared with the tort system's $200 billion drag on the economy. " The

costs of the tort system to society have gone up astronomically, " he

says. That figure, though, comes from the insurance-industry

consulting firm Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (TTP), which includes in its

definition of the " tort system " insurance company administrative costs

and overhead and the salaries of highly paid insurance company CEOs

(Maurice " Hank " Greenberg, chairman of AIG, one of the world's largest

insurance companies, makes $29 million a year). One thing TTP doesn't

include: court budgets, which makes its study seem a lot more like an

assessment of the insurance industry than of the legal system.

 

It's not as though Newsweek wasn't aware of these facts. On Friday,

Dec. 5, a day before the story went to press, Taylor contacted the

Association of Trial Lawyers of America (ATLA) for a quote. ATLA

relayed the request to the nonprofit Center for Justice and Democracy

(CJD), whose director, Joanne Doroshow, emailed Taylor information

that contradicted some of the assertions in the story, including the

state court data and a critique of the TTP study. (Doroshow provided

the entire email exchange to The Washington Monthly.) Taylor dismissed

it all, telling Doroshow, " Based on your many emails to me over the

past 24 hours, you have very little thoughtful analysis to contribute

to that debate. "

 

Taylor did, however, take lots of his information from Philip K.

Howard, the founder of Common Good, a group funded by corporations and

physicians seeking to limit their legal liability for wrongdoing.

Common Good's agenda includes advocating for legislation that would

end the civil jury's role in many lawsuits. To advance the cause,

Common Good helps reporters generate anti-lawsuit articles by

distributing colorful litigation horror stories from around the

country – the story from the Arizona Sun about Warner's softball

tournament, for instance, was linked on Common Good's Web site a few

months before the Newsweek story appeared.

 

Incidentally, Howard also works for the law firm of Covington &

Burling, which represents Newsweek's parent company. Post-Newsweek

Inc. has been sued a number of times for employment discrimination and

was hit with an $8.3 million verdict in 1999, a fact that Newsweek

didn't mention in the story.

 

Unfortunately, Newsweek's one-sided coverage of the civil justice

system is the rule, not the exception. Every few months, one or

another newspaper, magazine, or television show does a story just like

it. They all hew to a standard line, starting with a juicy but

misleading – or even fictitious – lawsuit horror story typically

describing an irresponsible plaintiff, followed by " studies " on the

economic damage of the tort system published by corporate front

groups, finally ending with calls for " reforms " to rein in

mushy-headed juries and greedy trial lawyers. Such skewed coverage

represents a victory in a sustained, 50-year public relations assault

on the civil justice system by the insurance industry, tobacco

companies, and other corporate giants. It's helped fuel political

support for curtailing Americans' right to hold corporations and

individuals accountable for negligence, fraud, and other malfeasance

in court. Perhaps more serious, journalists' willingness to perpetuate

anti-lawsuit propaganda has gravely jeopardized Americans' unique

democratic right to participate on civil juries.

 

Runaway Hedge-clippers

 

The current PR campaign by the insurance industry and other big

corporations is just the latest iteration of a long fight tracing back

to the 1950s. That was when plaintiffs' lawyers started breaking down

some of the legal barriers that had long protected industry from

responsibility for injuries to workers and consumers and opened up

jury pools to make them more representative of the general public. The

blood bath on the nation's highways during the post-war auto boom also

created a whole new arena of litigation over who should pay for the

injuries and deaths caused in car accidents. Auto insurance companies

were frequently in the middle of these disputes (as they are today;

insurance companies are the defendants in 90 percent of all

auto-accident lawsuits).

 

With their profits threatened by unfavorable jury verdicts, the

insurance industry started running anti-lawsuit ads targeted at

jurors. For instance, in 1953, the industry ran ads in Life magazine

and The Saturday Evening Post that declared, " ruled by emotion rather

than facts, [jurors] arrive at unfounded or excessive awards –

verdicts occasionally even higher than requested! " The ads implored

potential jurors to remember that " you pay for liability and damage

suit verdicts whether you are insured or not. "

 

The industry also successfully planted articles in national magazines

and TV shows that were designed to look like investigative reporting.

In 1962, CBS broadcast " Smash-Up, " a fictionalized docudrama that

portrayed sleazy lawyers faking auto accident cases. The Insurance

Information Institute, the industry's public relations arm, helped

write the script. In 1977, the venerable insurance company Crum &

Forester sponsored one of the first print ads that included what would

become a staple of anti-lawsuit rhetoric: the fictional lawsuit horror

story. The ad told the story of a guy who collected a $500,000 jury

verdict after he was injured using a lawnmower as a hedge clipper. The

agency later conceded that it had no factual basis for the story, but

that didn't keep it from circulating widely in the media and in

conservative political speeches.

 

The industry knew what it was doing. In 1979, Elizabeth Loftus, the

famous memory researcher and University of California psychologist,

tested the effects of this kind of advertising on potential jurors and

their decision making in the jury box. At the time, the industry was

spending $10 million on a series of ads in a host of national

magazines. In an article in The American Bar Association Journal,

Loftus reported that potential jurors who were exposed to even one

insurance ad awarded much less for pain and suffering than those who

weren't.

 

In the mid-1980s, with insurance companies hitting a slump, the

insurance industry's " tort reform " movement, as it became known,

broadened its emphasis. Instead of limiting itself to targeting

individual jurors through mass media advertising, the industry began

to heavily lobby legislators to restrict citizens' ability to sue. The

movement pursued strict caps on damage awards, tougher standards for

proving liability, and caps on plaintiffs' attorney fees. The

industry's crusade was taken up by small government conservatives, who

believed that tort reform paralleled their own efforts to fill the

federal bench with pro-business jurists and roll back government

regulations. They were also upset by changes in the 1960s and 1970s

that broadened legal protections for women and minorities, such as the

1964 Civil Rights Act, and the expansion of product liability

doctrines that made it easier for injured consumers to force companies

to compensate them for faulty products. Politically, it was a lot

easier to attack juries and trial lawyers than the popular consumer,

civil rights, and environmental protection laws they enforced – or the

injured victims they represented.

 

Advertising was a key component of those efforts. In 1986, Newsweek

ran a series of ads sponsored by the insurance industry under the

heading, " We all pay the price. " The ads warned that lawsuits were

driving ob/gyns out of business, shuttering local school sports

programs, and scaring the clergy out of counseling their flocks –

though few of these assertions turned out to be true. That same year,

1,600 tort reform measures were introduced in 44 state legislatures,

21 of which passed significant restrictions on lawsuits and jury

awards before adjourning.

 

Tort reformers still weren't satisfied but were hamstrung by the fact

that most Americans didn't see lawsuits as a huge problem. After all,

most people never have any contact with the legal system unless

they're getting divorced. So, a group of corporate leaders, including

AIG's Greenberg, set about to change that by pumping money into

right-wing think tanks to prepare a body of " evidence " proving that

not only was there a crisis in the courthouse but also that " we all

pay the price " as a result.

 

One of the most influential of those groups is the Manhattan

Institute, founded by the late CIA director William Casey. In 1986,

the institute created its Project on Civil Justice Reform with funding

from all the same insurance companies who'd been responsible for

circulating bogus lawsuit horror stories. The project was targeted

specifically at journalists. In a 1992 memo, institute president

William Hammett explained the strategy for molding reporters into a

" pro-tort reform " position: " Journalists need copy, and it's an

established fact that over time they'll 'bend' in the direction in

which it flows. For that reason, it is imperative that a steady stream

of understandable research, analysis, and commentary supporting the

need for liability reform be produced. If sometime during the present

decade, a consensus emerges in favor of serious judicial reform, it

will be because millions of minds have been changed, and only one

institution is powerful enough to bring that about: the combined force

of the nation's print and broadcast media, the most potent instrument

for public education – or miseducation – in existence. "

 

Over the next decade, the institute produced a blizzard of reports,

conferences, op-eds, books, and mailings all decrying the " litigation

explosion " and greedy trial lawyers. They cultivated sympathetic and

influential journalists such as " 20/20 " 's John Stossel, then-New

Republic editor Michael Kinsley, and TNR columnist Fred Barnes, and

more recently, Stuart Taylor, who frequently cites their work in his

columns for Newsweek, The National Journal, and The Atlantic Monthly.

The " research " conducted by the institute usually purported to show

how lawsuits impact the average consumer's daily life by raising the

cost of groceries or auto insurance or driving their favorite

physicians out of business. But some of the institute's " scholars "

played a little fast and loose with the facts.

 

Take the idea of a " tort tax, " the financial hit allegedly taken by

every citizen because of the legal system, which Taylor raised in his

December Newsweek article. It dates back to 1988, when Manhattan

Institute fellow Peter Huber coined the term in his book, Liability,

and claimed that the tort system cost Americans $300 billion a year.

Three years later, the figure made its way into a speech given by Vice

President Dan Quayle, who blamed lawyers for wrecking the economy.

After the speech, several researchers examined the methods Huber had

used to arrive at that figure. Huber, they found, had simply made it

up. As The Economist observed in 1992, " the $300 billion figure has no

discernible connection to reality. "

 

While the Manhattan Institute targeted the media elite, large

corporations also set about creating the appearance of a " grassroots "

movement to persuade lawmakers that tort reform had broad populist

appeal. As Neal Cohen, one of the PR geniuses behind this project

explained to a meeting of the Public Affairs Council in 1994, " In a

tort reform battle, if State Farm...is the leader of the coalition,

you're not going to pass the bill. It is not credible. OK? Because

it's so self-serving. " Cohen was speaking from experience. Since 1988,

he had been running Philip Morris's " family tort project " through the

D.C. consulting firm APCO, where he helped the tobacco industry wage a

multi-million stealth campaign to insulate itself from smokers'

lawsuits. By 1995, the tobacco industry was providing almost half the

budget – $5.5 million in a single year – for the American Tort Reform

Association (ATRA).

 

ATRA, in turn, helped funnel money to state level organizations called

Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (CALA). These chapters were responsible

for holding " lawsuit abuse awareness week, " buying ads on buses and

billboards, providing experts for reporters, generating " polls " that

claimed 99 percent of Americans believe there are too many frivolous

lawsuits. The groups were hardly grass-roots organizations of inflamed

citizens; the original chapter, in Weslaco, Texas, is just a shell

corporation housed in the local chamber of commerce.

 

Even after the corporate backing of these groups came to light (thanks

in part to Cohen's speech, a tape of which was obtained by some

muckraking reporters), tort reformers have continuted to use

variations of the technique. Most recently, doctors seeking to

restrict medical malpractice lawsuits have worked with corporate front

groups like Texans for Patient Access and Californians Allied for

Patient Protection.

 

After 50 years and hundreds of millions of dollars spent convincing

the public of a litigation crisis, the tort reformers have largely

succeeded. There's very little that journalists won't repeat and

readers won't swallow about the evils of the civil liability system.

 

The Lying Florists

 

In November 2002, viewers of " 60 Minutes " learned that Fayette, Miss.,

was the nation's capital of " jackpot justice, " a place where

" plaintiffs' lawyers have found that juries in rural, impoverished

places can be mighty sympathetic when one of their own goes up against

a big, rich, multinational corporation. " In the story, Morley Safer

interviewed a local florist who had received a multi-million dollar

settlement in a diet-drug lawsuit. The unnamed florist alleged that

trial lawyers were bribing jurors to give big awards. " The jury

awarded these people this money because they felt as if they were

going to get a cut off of it, " he told Safer.

 

During the broadcast, Safer interviewed Wyatt Emmerich, the publisher

of a newspaper in Jackson, who explained a few big verdicts there by

saying, " Look at the jurors. These are disenfranchised people. These

are people who've been left out of the system, who feel like, 'Hey,

stick it to the Yankee companies. Stick it to the insurance companies.

Stick it to the pharmaceutical companies.' The African Americans feel

like it's payback for disenfranchisement. And the rednecks, shall we

say, it's like, 'Hey, you know, get back at' revenge for the Civil

War. So there's a lot of resentment, a lot of class anger, a lot of

racial anger. And it's very easy to weave this racial conflict and

this class conflict into a big pot of money for the attorneys. " The

day after the program aired, the legislature passed new restrictions

on lawsuits.

 

Tiny Jefferson County's national reputation as a " judicial hellhole "

came in part from intense publicity from the American Tort Reform

Association, which every year publishes a " study " purporting to

identify various jurisdictions around the country it deems too

plaintiff-friendly and in need of reform. At the time of the " 60

Minutes " episode, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal

Reform was spending millions nationally on advertising and lobbying

for restrictions on citizens' rights to sue. At least $100,000 of that

had recently gone into an advertising campaign in Mississippi to push

for a cap on damages in lawsuits against corporations. Those facts

weren't included in the story. Meanwhile, the florist, Beau Strittman,

retracted his comments about the payoffs, telling the AP, " I just said

it as a joking statement. " CBS spokesman Kevin Tedesco said the

network could not comment on the segment because several jurors have

sued CBS for libel over the broadcast.

 

It wasn't the first time " 60 Minutes " got duped in an anti-lawsuit

segment. Back in 1986, the show profiled the owner of a ladder

manufacturing company who claimed his company had been hit with a

$300,000 jury verdict in a suit by a man who fell off a ladder because

he set it in a pile of manure. The business owner claimed the lawsuit

alleged the company should have warned buyers of the dangers of

setting ladders in dung. The real lawsuit had nothing to do with

manure; the ladder had broken with less than 450 pounds on it, even

though it had a safety rating that said it could support up to 1,000.

Tedesco says the show never ran a correction.

 

The print media, mostly opinion columnists, have proven even more

gullible in publishing stories about lawsuits that are simply

fictional. For instance, in June 2003, in a column entitled, " Welcome

to Sue City, U.S.A., " U.S. News & World Report owner Mort Zuckerman

claimed that " litigation has become our national pastime. " As proof,

he offered several examples of lawsuits that illustrated the nation's

" enormous inflation of rights over responsibilities. " Zuckerman wrote,

" A woman throws a soft drink at her boyfriend at a restaurant, then

slips on the floor she wet and breaks her tailbone. She sues. Bingo –

a jury says the restaurant owes her $100,000! A woman tries to sneak

through a restroom window at a nightclub to avoid paying the $3.50

cover charge. She falls, knocks out two front teeth, and sues. A jury

awards her $12,000 for dental expenses. "

 

The anecdotes were catchy. Unfortunately, they weren't true. The

stories had been circulating in an email for two years and had made it

into several mainstream news outlets, including another Zuckerman

property, The New York Daily News, which had published an email

containing one of the fake lawsuits in the sports section a year

earlier (with no correction). When The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz

called him on the U.S. News error, Zuckerman was unapologetic. The

magazine only published a brief clarification about the fictional

suits, which ended by saying, " Mr. Zuckerman continues to believe, and

most Americans agree, that we live in a country where far too many

frivolous lawsuits are filed each year. " When contacted by The

Washington Monthly, a spokesperson for Zuckerman refused to disclose

the source of the lawsuit anecdotes or to offer an explanation as to

why Zuckerman would publish anything from a spam email without

checking it out first.

 

Small-town papers seem even more vulnerable to such fabrications than

the national media, yet their impact is substantial, as battles over

most tort reform laws are fought in state legislatures, and juries are

drawn from local pools. For instance, in February last year, the

Weirton Daily Times in Weirton, W. Va., published an editorial

supporting tort reform and blaming juries for outrageous decisions in

frivolous lawsuits. Among the examples was the story of an Oklahoma

man who put his Winnebago on cruise control at 70 mph and " calmly left

the driver's seat to go into the back and make himself a cup of

coffee. " Naturally, after the crash, the man sued Winnebago for not

advising him of the dangers of cruise control. A jury awarded the man

$1.75 million and a new motor home, the paper said. But it turned out

that every one of the lawsuits mentioned in the Daily Times editorial

stemmed from an anonymous email and was fiction. A local attorney,

Michael Nogay, called Daily Times managing editor Richard Crofton and

alerted him to the error. But rather than print a humble retraction,

Crofton argued in print that the essence of the editorial was true and

published several examples of " real " frivolous lawsuits. " What really

killed me was that they didn't even say 'we're sorry,' " says Nogay,

who notes that the column came a week or so after the state chamber of

commerce had run a full-page ad in the paper calling for tort reform

while the legislature was in session. When I asked what made him write

about the suits without checking their veracity, Crofton says, " We're

a small paper, and I don't have the resources to track down things all

over the country. "

 

The media mogul Steve Brill first wrote about litigation myths back in

1986, when, as a journalist he traced several examples of the

allegedly " frivolous lawsuits " for The American Lawyer magazine and

found that many of them were simply urban legends. He says, " I had

gone back through the archives of Time magazine, and every ten years,

Time declared a 'litigation crisis.' But there was no crisis. "

Reporters' perpetuation of the litigation myths has become one of

Brill's pet peeves, even though, as a business owner himself, he

supports legal changes that would protect businesses. " Reporters are

basically lazy, " says Brill. " You can always find a ridiculous lawsuit

to make the system look crazy. "

 

The $30,000 Jackpot

 

The plain fact is, most lawsuits are neither ridiculous nor lucrative.

Despite the eye-popping headlines about billion-dollar fen-phen

verdicts or David v. Goliath movies about little guys taking on

corporate wrongdoers in court, the civil justice system looks a lot

more like this: On Aug. 2, 1997, Bonnie Daniels rear-ended Diane

Pitnikoff in Cumberland County, Maine, and was arrested for drunk

driving. Pitnikoff suffered a number of lingering injuries and ran up

$42,000 in medical bills. Pitnikoff sued Daniels for $100,000. On

March 20, 2003, a jury voted in favor of Pitnikoff, awarding her a

grand total of $21,000.

 

It's not a very sexy story – hardly the kind of thing that captures

the imagination and lands on the cover of Newsweek. Yet most tort

lawsuits in this country – nearly 60 percent – involve simple

fender-benders, and the awards are generally quite small and getting

smaller. New data released in April by the Justice Department's BJS

show that in state courts, the median " jackpot " jury verdict in all

tort suits was a mere $37,000 in 2001 – down from $65,000 in 1992.

 

And what of the undeserved billions in punitive damages that Newsweek

says Americans win from sympathetic juries? Punitive damage awards are

intended to punish wrongdoers for reprehensible conduct, and as a

result, must be high enough to get the defendant's attention. That's

why an Alaska jury hit Exxon with a $4.5 billion penalty in the wake

of the Valdez spill. But such awards are so rare that, according to

BJS, the median punitive damage award in 2001 was only $50,000. Only 7

percent of all plaintiffs were awarded $1 million or more.

 

Because the Justice Department data conflict so sharply with

conventional wisdom, you'd think it would have been big news. The

media coverage that resulted from the new government study? Forty

words in the USA Today. As of mid-August, no major media outlet had

covered the study, including Newsweek. National editor Tom Watson says

that his magazine has a strict policy of not commenting on its own

news coverage. " No one is willing to report that tort awards are down,

and that they're 30,000 bucks, not 5 million, " says Theodore

Eisenberg, a Cornell University law school professor who does

empirical research on the legal system.

 

Indeed, the tort reformers' message has proven remarkably resistant to

correction. Part of the reason is that those who have another side of

the story to present have vastly fewer resources with which to make

their case. BJS has a publicity budget of zero dollars, making it

tough for the bureau to publicize its remarkable findings. Trial

lawyers, who do have some money, have been reluctant to fight back in

the media because they recognize that they are universally mistrusted.

They've picked their fight in the courthouse, where they challenge

tort reform proposals as unconstitutional.

 

Tort reformers, too, have deftly manipulated reporters' weaknesses,

like the over-reliance on the anecdotal lead. Editors are always

imploring writers to find a perfect anecdote that can sum up a

complicated problem in 40 words or less. This can be a useful tool for

conveying information to a reader, but when it comes to something as

complex as civil justice system, the technique often backfires because

the juiciest anecdotes tend to be the exception rather than the rule.

And reporters simply don't expect to be lied to when an advocacy group

hands them tales of a crazy lawsuit or a study about economic trends –

a naiveté that the tort reform movement has skillfully exploited. Gary

Alan Fine, a sociology professor at Northwestern University and an

expert on contemporary legends, says most people, including reporters,

" rely on the trust we have of others. "

 

Lobbying groups and industry financed think tanks have also taken

advantage of an information vacuum. For years, most state courts never

collected information on case outcomes and jury awards, so real

numbers were hard to come by. Tort reformers have expertly filled this

void with their own figures. " When there's no data, you can just make

stuff up, " says Eisenberg.

 

Even when there are relatively good data, they are easy to misread.

The RAND Corporation's Institute for Civil Justice has reliable jury

verdict data for two counties in Illinois and California going back 40

years. At one point, California's average jury verdicts showed a big

jump. A tort reform lobbyist might point to the same data as proof

that emotional jurors are giving away a lot more money. In fact, what

happened was that California raised the dollar limits for cases that

could be pressed in small claims court, taking the small cases out of

the main court, thus pushing up its statistical average even when the

actual awards stayed constant. " It's really, really hard to make any

inferences about what's going on out there from jury verdicts, " says

RAND's Seth Seabury.

 

Indeed, the " onslaught of litigation " over the past 30 years decried

in Newsweek is a relative term. In 1962, for instance, only about 300

civil rights lawsuits were filed in federal courts. In 2000, there

were more than 40,000 – an onslaught, to be sure, but that's because

prior to 1964, racial discrimination was legal.

 

Michael McCann, director of the Comparative Law and Society Studies

Center at the University of Washington, suspects that legal myths

remain so pervasive because Americans want to believe them. He says

that tort reformers have turned the frivolous lawsuit " into a morality

tale about the loss of personal responsibility. " He also suspects that

the flexible American legal system lends itself to such caricatures

because in America, fat people really can sue McDonalds (whether they

would win is an entirely different matter), so many of the fake

lawsuit stories don't seem like that much of a stretch.

 

The news coverage may be creating some unexpected consequences: Some

academic researchers suspect that all the hype about the litigation

crisis might actually be making Americans more litigious by giving

them the erroneous impression that compensation is available through

the courts for most injuries. As McCann says, " Tort reformers may have

produced more frivolous claims while making legitimate claims harder

to bring. "

 

Indeed, if Americans really are overcome with fear of lawsuits, it

might be because they've been reading too many Newsweek articles. At

least that's the rationale cited by the organizers of annual Polar

Bear Plunge back in Page, Ariz. In January, organizer Paul Ostapuk

told the local newspaper that he was canceling the annual event at

Lake Powell because " Given the rampant rise in frivolous lawsuits

across the nation and the recent Newsweek article…I've had to play it

safe and rethink the 2004 Polar Bear Plunge event. " Ostapuk said he

was planning to reschedule for next year – after buying some insurance.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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