All you have to do is read the daily paper:
Texas lawyers win $1 for client, collect $1.5 million in fees . . . Mugger shot by cop, sues cop, collects . . . Little Leaguer misses pop fly, gets hit in eye, parents sue coach . . . Girl Scouts sell 87,000 boxes of cookies just to pay liability insurance . . . Student falls backward out of dorm window while ““mooning’’ friends, sues college.
Most of the outlandish jury awards in cases like these are reversed or reduced on appeal. But people still tell lawyer jokes, and that’s the problem. They’re not funny anymore. Something dangerous happens to a society that laughs at its legal system.
I have a theory that Americans show so little respect for lawyers because they have so much respect for the law. I remember when lawyers built reputations for things like guaranteeing people the right to vote or to live where they wanted, not for suiing the Girl Scouts. The law is there to protect us. When it doesn’t, it’s because somebody is tinkering with it.
Companies should be held accountable, but the concept of ““joint and several’’ liability was devised by someone who had no interest in justice. Nobody with a normal ration of common sense can defend the idea that I could be 1 percent at fault and 100 percent liable. If that level of intelligence prevailed in the engineering profession, we’d have square wheels on our cars.
If I rob a bank, the penalty is spelled out beforehand. If someone slips on my sidewalk, it could cost me a few thousand dollars or my entire net worth. That decision is left to a jury.
The concept of class-action litigation makes some sense. But a lawyer filing a suit on behalf of a whole ““class’’ of people should have some of them as clients. At least one. Chrysler recently sued three lawyers who filed a class-action claim against the company but didn’t have a single client.
The United States is the only country that routinely uses juries for civil cases. It is the only country that doesn’t have some kind of ““loser pays’’ rule to discourage frivolous suits, and it’s virtually the only country that allows unlimited use of contingent legal fees.
That helps explain why our tort system costs all of us between $150 billion and $300 billion a year. Even if you take the low number, that’s 2i times what we spend on police and fire protection. That is a tort tax of $1,200 per American. If you have a heart pacemaker that costs $18,000, $3,000 of it is a tort tax. If you have a wheelchair that costs $1,000, $170 of it is a tort tax. Half the price of a football helmet goes to cover the liability insurance.
Some consumer advocates say these hidden taxes (paid by consumers, of course) help keep big business honest. Actually, what they do is keep these folks and the trial lawyers who bankroll them alive. And a few politicians as well.
American trial lawyers have taken tithing to new heights. In just three states–Alabama, Texas and California–they gave about $20 million to local candidates between 1990 and 1994. That’s more than local candidates in all 50 states received from either the Democratic or Republican National Committee.
The Washington Post reported earlier this year that the trial lawyers had put more money into President Clinton’s election campaign than all the retired people in the country, all the doctors, teachers, civil servants and all the media and entertainment people combined! That’s why they’ve been called ““America’s third political party.’’ They contribute to build a wall against tort reform. But reform is coming because the cases are getting sillier and people are still laughing.
Ten-year-old kids are taught that the law is absolute. They’re told to respect and obey it because it’s the right thing to do. But 50-year-old business executives hire platoons of lawyers to figure out how to use the law for their own gains, to get around it or to protect themselves. Hardly anyone ever talks about right and wrong anymore. Nothing is absolute. ““Absolute’’ has been replaced by ““possible.''
There’s a disconnect between what we were taught in civics class and the way the adult world really works. And the word for that disconnect is cynicism. People laugh at lawyer jokes because it is sophisticated today to be cynical about the law. It’s not funny. It’s sad. It’s sad that in a nation built by risk-takers a company stops doing AIDS research because the legal risks are too high. And it’s sad that our litigious society has changed the way we relate to one another as human beings.
For one thing, you can’t say ““I’m sorry’’ anymore. If your tree falls on your neighbor’s house, you can’t say ““I’m sorry.’’ That’s admitting guilt. Better let your lawyer handle it with his lawyer. If a company makes a mistake and ships a defective product, it can’t simply say ““I’m sorry,’’ and then make it right. Instead, it’s forced to treat its friends and customers as potential litigants.
It’s a crowded world we live in, and we’re going to bump into each other sometimes. We’re going to offend one another once in a while. We’ll even hurt one another. Not because we set out to do it, but because–well, just because it’s crowded.
There’s something wrong with a system that robs you of the catharsis and the simple civility of saying, ““I’m sorry. What can I do to make it right?’’ There’s something wrong when being intellectually honest makes you dead meat for people who aren’t. There’s also something wrong with a system that encourages people who would never think of stealing from a store to steal through the courts because their lawyers tell them it’s OK–that they’re entitled–even if the defendant hasn’t harmed them in any way, and then they go to church with clear consciences because ““right and wrong’’ has nothing to do with it anymore.
