[Slonopotam845]

http://hnn.us/blogs/20.html

Orwellian Politics

When it comes to the rights of ordinary citizens to redress their grievances in court, we have truly entered an Orwellian world where white is black and war in peace. We hear, for example, that the new law restricting class action suits actually creates opportunities by opening up federal courts for such lawsuits. In fact, the federal courts have always been open for such suits. What the new law does is restrict access to state courts by forcing certain types of class actions into less hospitable federal courts as the authors of the law know well.

The dockets of federal courts are already crowded, and federal judges have less experience in these realms than state judges. Many cases involve violations of state consumer laws and conservative presidents could appoint business-friendly judges unsympathetic to consumer grievances, shutting off options for litigants.

Special interest groups, seeking to deflect onto others the costs of their own misdeeds, have created the myth that America suffers from a “litigation explosion.” It is a false claim largely based on analyses financed by those same interests and sustained by anecdotal and usually inaccurate reports of spectacular miscarriages of jury discretion.

According to data compiled by the National Center for State Courts, tort filings in 35 states (comprising 77 percent of the population) for which comparable data are available, declined by 4 percent from 1993 to 2002. After adjusting for population, per-capita tort filings fell by some 13 percent during this ten-year period.

Statistics from a United States Department of Justice study of the nation’s 75 largest counties in 2001 shows that tort trials decreased by 23 percent over ten years. In tort jury trials, the median award declined by 56 percent, from $64,000 in 1992 to $28,000 in 2001 – an inflation adjusted decline of 65 percent.

In federal courts, which deal with well under 10 percent of tort cases, tort filings have also declined in recent years, falling by about 6 percent from 1997 to 2003, according to federal judicial statistics. The federal tort filings fell by about 14 percent per-capita during this period.

Why, you might ask, do conservatives inside and without the Bush administration, who champion individual freedom, the Constitution, and victim’s rights, support government meddling in the freedom of individuals to redress their grievances constitutionally in the courts. The answer is that donor pocketbooks trump principles. As for the rest of us, its time to say that we’re not going to shield the negligent and the incompetent or abandon those injured physically, emotionally, and monetarily through no fault of their own.

Mr. Lichtman is a professor of history at American University and the author of The Keys to the White House (1996).