Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

I don’t mind a fair debate on Edwards’ positions.  I sure take exception to the assertion that trial lawyers have a deleterious effect on the economy.  I don’t want to imagine corporate behavior unchecked by trial lawyers fighting for justice.

How about the deleterious effects the oil industry has had on the American economy?  Did you raise that as an objection when Dumbya Bush announced his candidacy?  Given subsequent events, maybe you should have.

What is the deleterious effect of making corporate wrongdoers compensate their victims?  Or, stated another way, does the professor believe that our economy can only be vibrant and grow if corporations are free to cheat, pollute, exploit their employees, fix prices, allocate markets and produce shoddy and dangerous goods with impunity?  Isn’t it time to give up the knee jerk reaction to trial lawyers?

Here Here wise Professor

The plantiff’s bar has run amok.  While a robust system for compensating parties injured by wrong-doing is necessary for both individual justice and public good, our current tort system is vastly disproportionate and inefficient.  It rewards some “victims” (and their lawyers) with little relation to harm or the actual existence of wrongdoing. In short, it is wasteful and capricious.  Although Edwards’ certainly isn’t at fault for the broken-ness of our system, the kind of skills that he acquired and has so ably exhibited within that perverted system--sloganeering, sentimental story-telling and one sided advocacy--are not the qualities we should seek in our President.  Instead of prudence, sound judgement and trust-worthy leadership, we’re likely to get the opposite--and its worth noting, an even stronger dose of the worst elements of the Bush Presidency from an Edwards’ White House--bumpersticker slogans rather than well-reasoned arguments, dogmatic thinking rather than carefully-considered decisions, and exquisitely choreographed imagery rather than substantive leadership.  John Edwards’ intelligence and skills do make him deserving of a top job at an advertising or public relations firm, or perhaps as a sports’ agent… just not the White House, where he’d be better suited to serve as Press Secretary.

Edwards stabbed americans in the back by co-sponsoring a huge increase in H-1b visas

He’s a jerk

From the report, “Total tort costs today exceed $200 billion annually, or more than 2% of America’s gross domestic product.” Is that a reasonable amount for corporate oversite?  How much of that was from tobacco?

The basic premise of the Trial Lawyer’s Inc. report that you cite is the argument that the United States spends a greater, and therefore unreasonable, percentage of its GDP on tort related expenses than does any other developed country.  Unfortunately, unless you are advocating universal health coverage, the US has chosen the tort system as its method of compensating an injured person for his medical care.  Remove present and future medicals and the cost of obtaining such compensation from the tort system totals and the US numbers come back into line with other developed countries that do provide medical care.  Unless you are prepared to propose a viable alternative means of allocating liability and compensating victims for medical care, your criticism of a practitioner of the US system is no more than a weak repetition of a partisan talking point.

The deleterious effect of the trial lawyer industry is no worse than that of the handicapped access industry or the pro-life industry.  Think about the cost of all of those handicapped ramps, bathrooms, wheelchair width aisles, etc.  Or think about all of the money expended on pro-life court cases and legislation. 

These are just a couple of examples of criticizing a movement for its flaws while completely ignoring the critical services it provides.  How many children are alive today because toy manufacturers give much more careful thought to the products that they put on the market because of the threat of lawsuits? Are these children’s lives any less valuable than the children’s lives saved by the pro-life movement?  Is dramatically increasing the quality of life for the disabled really worth all of the trouble of paying for and installing all of that extra equipment?

Also, suggesting that a personal injury attorney has never taken a pro bono law suit is pretty disengenuous.  Professor, would you care to tell everybody how much Mr. Edwards earned on the cases that he lost?

I think that the Manhattan Institute web site that you rely on is clearly problematic.  For one, its fundamental premise is that the world of “Trial Lawyers” (an anti-plaintiff’s bar coinage) has become a “big business.” The obvious inference is that plaintiff’s attorneys are hypocrites, since they allege to be against big business but are themselves a big business.  What’s worse, they are a big business that can’t be regulated by any anti-trust laws.  Although the author does not seem to indicate why plaintiff’s attorneys should be categorically opposed to big business (as opposed to merely fraud within big business), the real problem lies in the fact that the author does not use any facts to support the allegation that the 2% of the American G.D.P. which these attorney’s are inappropriately taking is the result of collusion on the part of these new robber barons.  This is of course, because there are no facts to support such a view.  Anyone who has spent any time with any member of the plaintiff’s bar knows that plaintiff’s attorneys spend more time fighting other plaintiff’s attorneys then anyone else. They may be rapacious. They may be solely motivated by financial gain.  But, they don’t work together.

Despite the fact that the word “scholarly” is used by the Manhattan Institute to describe their own publication, the work you have linked to draws inappropriate conclusions, lacks rigor, and is unfit for submission at the undergraduate level.

How about the deleterious effects of the trial lawyering machine our society?  We live in a society where teachers can’t hug their children, parents can’t spank their kids, people can’t compliment a colleague on his/her clothing, a person thinks twice about helping out a stranger lest they get sued by the helped, etc., etc.  The trial lawyer industry has severely damaged our community.  And let’s not even talk about what it has done to the concept of individual responsibility and adulthood.  We live in a time where we can cash in on the hard realities of life by suing “the system” with the help of trial lawyers, for whatever problem we experience.  They have turned people into greedy, irresponsible babies, further damage community and society as a whole.

Mr. Basehart, “Personal repsonsibility” is what Trial Lawyers are all about.  Holding people and corporations responsible for damage they do.  No one sues “the system,” people sue those whe cause damage and fail to take responsiblity for the damage they cause.  Trial lawyers are not the reason teachers can’t hug students.  And...Parents can spank their kids, have at it.

So you are citing the Manhattan Institute as a reliable source regarding trial lawyers.  You do know who funds the Manhattan Institute don’t you?  You do understand that all of the corporate spigots at the Manhattan Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, etc. make a living spouting the positions that are in the economic interests of their corporate sponsors, don’t you?

Citing their “study” is a bit like citing the opinions of the UCLA athletic director regarding how the Bruins are going to do next season.

Get a clue.

I venture to say pompous windbag professors have a more deleterious effect on the economy than do trial lawyers, given that they tend to sit in protected academia and sponge off either the taxpayers or the tuition and fees of America’s families while publishing inanities on their personal weblogs.

There are essentially two ways to rein in corporate behavior.  Corporations, not being corporeal persons (but instead legal constructs) live forever, and thus can trample the rights of those of us who actually do have a limited lifespan and a need to sleep occasionally.  Corporate behavior can be regulated through Government regulation, which tends to be heavyhanded and non case-specific, and thus, to a free-marketeer, BAD.  Or, it can be regulated on a free-market basis: you do bad, you get sued by a trial lawyer, if he proves his case, you pay. 

Which would you rather have?  The Europeans, for decades, chose the former.  We chose the latter.  Who has had the healthier economy over the last 100 years?

Hmmmm?  Professor?

The professor has struck a nerve it appears.  I think the country is beginning to really resent trial lawyer bashing.

"The professor has struck a nerve it appears. I think the country is beginning to really resent trial lawyer bashing.”

I think it is more a matter of fatigue rather than resentment.  Look at the declining viewer/listenership of Hannity, O’Reilly, etc., and you start to see the bigger picture.