Failure™ Magazine

And Justice For All?

Debunking the myth of lawsuit abuse.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Business

By this time, he needed an oxygen tank to breathe, he was confined to a wheelchair, and was addicted to pain-killers. When he went to file a medical malpractice lawsuit, he found out the hard way that damages in Indiana were capped at $500,000. That was the most money he could be compensated, even after all these injuries. Cornelius ultimately committed suicide, but before he died he wrote a mea culpa to the New York Times about how the work he had done 15 or 20 years earlier had come back to haunt him. He was a victim of his own reform. Between his lost income and the cost of his medical care he had damages that were in excess of $5 million. He was only able to recover a tiny fraction of that.

What role has the media played in building public support for tort reform?
The fundamental problem is how news agencies cover the civil justice system. Most reporters never cover trials. They only cover verdicts. So the only time there is ever news about the civil justice system is when somebody wins a lot of money in a jury verdict. The public gets the perception that you could slip on a banana peel and win millions of dollars, because that’s all they hear about. It’s a very distorted portrait of the legal system.

Does the mainstream media have an incentive to misrepresent the truth about the legal system?
Some of the major media companies have done that, but there’s really not that big of a conspiracy. Newspapers are understaffed and they just don’t have enough bodies to sit in court all day and report on the civil side of things. So that’s part of the problem.

The other part is that reporters are often threatened with lawsuits, and some of them do get sued. Their firsthand experience with the civil justice system is often unpleasant. So a lot of reporters probably think that tort reform is a good idea.

Page 3 of 5 pages « First < 1 2 3 4 5 > Last »