|
| Home > Legal > It's just the price of doing business |
| It's just the price of doing business | | Date Created: Mar 06, 2005, 01:34 PM |
I thought this was rather amazing. Walter Olson of Overlawyered.com even reads the footnotes. This was in the majority report from the Judicial Committee of the House. Newsweek's Stuart Taylor Jr. got the credit but Olson was the source. The Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act of 2004 failed of course.
[Footnote 81: Id. at 17. According to an analysis of a report by the National Center for State Courts by Newsweek's Stuart Taylor, Jr., although tort filings declined by 9 percent from 1992 to 2001, almost all of that decline came in routine car-crash lawsuits. The report shows that medical malpractice claims increased by 24 percent from 1992-2001 and that total tort filings soared by 40 percent from 1975 to 2001, despite a dip during the 1990's. See Stuart Taylor, Jr. Response to ATLA's Claims, available at http://www.overlawyered.com/archives/000708.html. Chief Justice Rehnquist released new data on January 1, 2004, showing an 8 percent drop in civil filings in fiscal year 2003, `primarily as a result of decreases in personal injury/product liability cases involving asbestos (such filings had soared 98 percent the previous year).' William H. Rehnquist, 36 The Third Branch 1 (January 2004), 2003 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chapter III, n.5. See also Economic Report of the President (February 2004), at 204-05 (`The number of injuries handles by the tort system has increased along with expenditures. The number of filings per capita started to rise in the early 1980's and peaked in the mid-1980's, at least in the 16 states for which data on lawsuit filings are available between 1975 and 2000. Much of the decline in filings since 1985 appears to have occurred in California, where medical liability reforms included a $250,000 limit for noneconomic damages that was found constitutional in 1985.').]
A recent report by Judyth Pendell, Senior Fellow at the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and Paul Hinton, Vice President of NERA Economic Consulting, has concluded that `The tort liability price tag for small businesses in America is $88 billion a year' and that `Small businesses bear 68 percent of business tort liability costs, but take in only 25% of business revenue.' 82
[Footnote] The small businesses studied in the report account for 98% of the total number of businesses with employees in the United States. 83 |
|
|
|
|
|
