Over the last several decades, a relentless and more or less successful campaign has been waged by a collection of interests identifiable as the "tort reform" movement, aimed at closing the courthouse door to civil litigants as much as possible. This group strives to make it as difficult as possible for victims of corporate or other misconduct to sue and hold accountable in court those who harm them. Even more detrimentally, this same "tort reform" group has succeeded in shaping and leading important national narratives about the law and lawyers. Now, more than ever before in recent history, lawyers, lawsuits, and an overly litigious society are blamed for everything from the rising costs of health care to the state of the economy.
This blog is being launched to right this imbalance, and to affirmatively engage the "tort reform" movement's ideas in a popular medium that is accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
The myths:
Question: Why are medical insurance premiums costs so high?
Answer: Lawyers.
Question: Why can't I get a good doctor in my community?
Answer: Lawyers.
Question: Why isn't the economy in my state improving?
Answer: Lawyers.
Question: Why is American culture disintegrating?
Answers: Lawyers.
Question: Why did my wife leave me?
Answer: Lawyers.
What does this dynamic leave us with? In short what we have is one of the most ironic and unfortunate public policy parodies of our time. The very same large corporations that the American public is wary of in the wake of recent corporate scandals have somehow convinced us that the biggest threat to America and Americans are the lawyers who most often sue these corporations. The very same corporations which are most often brought to court for violations of our nation's laws, have convinced us that the lawyers who rightfully bring them there, often on behalf of thousands of mistreated Americans, are somehow 'bad.'
This identification of lawyers with all things bad did not just happen organically. Let us not forget that lawyers fighting for civil rights helped push through important changes in American society like Brown v. Board of Education. It is not as if lawyers were always seen as "bad" (unless of course you opposed national integration of our nation's schools), in that lawyers have fought for and secured some of our most treasured rights.
Instead, the message of lawyers as "bad" has been carefully nurtured through a consistent and powerful communications campaign funded by corporate interests. Moreover, in the ongoing battle of words and ideas between different sides of this "tort" debate, the "tort reform" movement has been far more accessible and successful in communicating its message. As described in the book "Distorting the Law,"
"Legal professional and social scientists tended to publish their challenges to the tort reform movement in law reviews, professional journals, and other esoteric scholarly venues that few citizens or policy-makers read. By contrast, populist tort reformers, although often writing for targeted audiences, managed to find much more popular outlets for their narratives."
Thus, the success of the communications campaign of the "tort reform" movement is not just superior financial resources (resulting from corporate sponsorship), but the use of more appropriate communications tools. The intention of this blog is to tip the balance in the favor of proponents of a robust tort system, and to do so in a way that's accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
If we truly succeed, this blog will also be interesting to read. Part of this appeal will likely come from the blog's ability to inform Americans of their civil rights, as well as to advocate for the creation of mechanisms and procedures that allow more Americans to gain access to the courts. This educational element is an important goal separate and apart from a discussion about "tort reform."
More pointedly, as this blog's discussion progresses, I think that it will become increasingly clear that for Americans to be equal under the law and to fully realize our civil rights, we all must be entitled to something called "civil Gideon." Civil Gideon is the legal right to representation in important civil proceedings such as eviction proceedings in housing court. At the end of the day it is this deeper failing of our current civil justice system that is most in need of reform.
We can't say how excited we are to begin this conversation with you, as well as the rest of the nation. And we wholeheartedly invite you to participate in a dialogue with our four primary contributors, and our more than twenty guest contributors as we begin this conversation with America.
Those of you who may be familiar with me know that I work on a volunteer basis with an oncologist at a Manhattan hospital. I often write about what I witness first-hand--the daily assaults perpetrated by insurers against both insured and uninsured Americans who find themselves sick, vulnerable, and at the mercy of an unforgiving system.
On Daily Kos, researching and writing about the American healthcare crisis always leads to this one question: How can the richest nation on the planet allow 47 million of its own citizens to go without basic healthcare services? Forty years ago, healthcare accounted for about 5 percent of GDP. Today it hovers around 16.5 percent. This is a flagrant example of government policies that are clearly not working and not good for America. Not having access to affordable healthcare is a black-and-white kind of issue. And what I discovered is that there are no "good" answers and an awful lot of bad ones. Or self-serving ones. And there's also just a lot of good old-fashioned lying and spin going on out there.
These issues are important in and of themselves, but are also critical elements in the debate about "tort reform" and the causes of increasingly unaffordable healthcare in America. Right now the national narrative suggests that medical malpractice lawsuits are primarily responsible for skyrocketing medical costs, and the inability to provide all Americans with basic healthcare. In fact, the costs of malpractice premiums amount to about 1 percent of total U.S. healthcare expenditures. I will be taking a critical look at all the explanations for spiraling healthcare costs, and investigate the veracity of the present national narrative.
]]> Let this also serve as a warning. When it comes to commonsense right and wrong, I'm not good with nuance - and I don't see an ounce of nuance in such a failure."We now have the ability to support leaders wherever they may be. Leaders that would never have a chance in the traditional world of establishment politics or media... People power is a wonderful thing. Everyone can be a leader. Everyone can be a strong voice. Everyone can make a difference. There has been far too much talent, far too much passion, far too much intelligence in this country marginalized by the establishment currently stinking up Washington D.C. And now, that talent has an outlet. It can no longer be marginalized."
The question is, really: Who's making the most?
And like everything in health care - a $2 trillion industry in the United States - the answer isn't simple. The really complicated issues, and the ones that generate the most controversy, are:
What's driving the high cost of medicine? Who's to blame? What can we do about it?
The questions typically set off finger pointing among insurers, hospitals, doctors, lawyers and others.
I have even more "profound" questions, such as, what good are insurance companies if they refuse to pay for life-saving treatments?
There's no acceptable way to frame such a foolish question. But this is what the healthcare meltdown has come to in America - need I remind you, still the richest country on the planet.
If you concede, as I do, that our system is absurd, then asking questions like the one I just posed above becomes much more rational. There are other ridiculous questions I'll be asking. Things like:
Why are pharmaceutical company reps buying physicians golf clubs?
Why are insurance companies making medical decisions?
Why are uninsured Americans expected to pay retail for hospital care while insurance companies pay wholesale?
Why is our entire system geared to maximize profits for Wall Street?
What good is health insurance if insurance companies can legally refuse to pay for absolutely essential medical care, chemotherapy, and medications?
What good are drugs if sick people can't afford them?
Regarded as one of the most respected lawyers to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, Alan Morrison focuses his scholarship on separation-of-powers issues, administrative law, and public interest law. He worked for over 30 years in the public interest engaging in a wide range of law reform litigation and brought cases to trial in areas affecting the separation of powers, the legal profession, and the control of federal regulatory agencies, among others. He is a member and past president of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and an elected member of the American Law Institute. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004, Professor Morrison was the director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, the Washington, D.C.-based consumer rights advocacy group he cofounded with Ralph Nader in 1972, and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He has taught at New York University Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Hawaii.
]]>Allison Wall was recently recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as a 2006 Notable Georgian, and by the Georgia Informer weekly newspaper as one of Georgia’s Fifty Most Influential Women of 2005.
An Atlanta native, Mrs. Wall founded Georgia Watch, the state’s leading consumer watchdog in November 2002. Before starting Georgia Watch, she worked for United Parcel Service’s Public Affairs office in Washington, D.C. and advocated for stricter air pollution controls and healthier air quality statewide on behalf of the Rockefeller Family Fund. She has a B.A. degree in political science from the University of Georgia.
]]>Cyrus is a recent graduate of NYU Law School. Before law school he was engaged in community development work for five summers as a volunteer, Project Supervisor, Assistant Project Director, and Project Director in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Honduras. In addition to his summertime work in Latin America, Cyrus spent a summer in Ghana performing research on matrilineal inheritance with Alliance International Research for Minority Scholars. Shortly after college he worked as a researcher at Massachusetts Voters for Fair Elections (a clean elections advocacy group) and as an intern at Political Research Associates (a research center dedicated to studying right wing movements). During law school Cyrus interned at Make the Road by Walking, the Socio-Economic Rights Project of the Community Law Center in Capetown, the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the New York State Defenders Association's Immigrant Defense Project, and the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Working Group. His law school extracurricular activities included serving as Co-Chair of the NYU Chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild (2004-2005), Education Chair of NYU's Law Students for Human Rights (2004-2005), MCC Representative of NYU BALSA (2004-2005), and Co-Chair of NYU's Public Interest Law Foundation (2005-2006). In his last year at NYU, Cyrus served as an Articles Selection Editor for the NYU Review of Law and Social Change (2005-2006) and was selected as the Arthur Garfield Hays Roger Baldwin Civil Rights & Human Rights Fellow (2005-2006).
]]>Brian Wolfman has been Director and General Counsel of the Public Citizen Litigation Group since 2004, and was a staff lawyer with Public Citizen before, beginning in March of 1990. His practice areas include general appellate litigation, consumer health and safety, federal preemption, class actions, access to the courts, open government, and poverty law. Wolfman's teaching history includes an adjunct professorship at Harvard Law School from 2004 until the present, teaching an Appellate Courts Workshop; a position at Stanford Law School in January 2001 as an Irvine Visiting Lecturer in Law, teaching an Appellate Courts Seminar (from public law perspective); a position at Washington College of Law from Spring 1997 through the present, teaching courses on appellate courts and advocacy as an adjunct; positions at Georgetown University Law Center in Fall 1995 and Fall 1997, teaching courses on professional responsibility and appellate advocacy as adjunct. Wolfman also served as a Trustee at the Clients' Security Fund of the D.C. Bar from July of 1999 to July of 2004, where he was appointed by D.C. Court of Appeals for 5-year term, and served as Chair from September of 2003 to July of 2004, and as Vice-Chair from April 2002 to August 2003. In these positions, he investigated and ruled on claims that D.C. Bar members have converted money or other property entrusted to them by clients and others. Wolfman was a Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow in November 1993, advising students at Harvard Law School on careers in public interest law. He also worked as a staff attorney for the rural legal services program of Legal Services of Arkansas in Little Rock from November 1985 until March 1990, where he represented poor people in all areas of poverty law in state and federal courts, and before administrative agencies. Wolfman also served as Law Clerk to Judge R. Lanier Anderson, III on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Cir. in Macon, GA from August of 1984 to August of 1985. He recieved his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in December 1977, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in June 1984.
]]>Charles Silver holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure and is Co-Director of the Center on Lawyers, Civil Justice, and the Media at the University of Texas School of Law. He obtained an M.A. in Political Science at the University of Chicago in 1982, served as the Managing Editor of Ethics from 1982-1984, graduated from the Yale Law School in 1987, and joined the Texas faculty that year. He has published widely on class actions and complex lawsuits, attorneys’ fees, the professional responsibilities of lawyers, insurance, and health care law and policy. Professor Silver currently serves as Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute’s project on Aggregate Litigation.
]]>Biography to come.
]]>Biography to come.
]]>Henry Greenspan teaches social psychology and social ethics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a Faculty Scholar at the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University Michigan Medical School and the Founder of Justice in Michigan: an organization of policy analysts, social scientists, bioethicists, and physicians supporting legislation that would rescind Michigan's draconian drug industry immunity law. He is also internationally known for his work in the area of Holocaust and genocide studies and the author of On Listening to Holocaust Survivors and Reflections: Auschwitz, Memory, and a Life Recreated.
]]>Biographies to come.
]]>Jeffrey Feldman is the Editor -in-Chief and Founder of Frameshop. First established in late 2004, Frameshop began as a diary series posted to two large blogs The DailyKos and MyDD. Frameshop launched as an independent website Jan. 1, 2005.
Dr. Feldman has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology which he applies broadly to the analysis of politics and communication. He lives and teaches in New York City, and is s a regular guest on the national syndicated radio show The Thom Hartmann Radio Program which can be heard locally and online via Air America Radio.
To inquire about a potential speaking engagement or consulting, please make initial contact by email (click here).
]]>Ms. Abel, who has worked at the Center since 1999, currently helps to run the Center's Access to Justice and Nonprofit Rights initiatives. Her work is aimed at enhancing the ability of low-income families and individuals to secure legal counsel, and at securing the freedom of nonprofit organizations to exercise their First Amendment rights in the course of assisting low-income communities. Prior to joining the Brennan Center, Ms. Abel was a Gibbons Fellow at Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. where she litigated on behalf of low-income people in a wide variety of cases. In preceding years, she was a staff attorney fellow for the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project and clerked for Judge Robert Carter of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Ms. Abel received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1994.
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