Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | Trial

Speaking truth to power: it may seem that trial lawyers are alone in the fight to protect the civil justice system from attack, but they're not, says this fellow veteran of the tort 'reform' wars.

Article Excerpt
A few months ago, newspapers in cities across the country ran full-page ads featuring the face of a screaming man and colossal, blood-red text alerting readers that something was destroying their jobs, raising their taxes, and stealing their money. That "something" was the civil justice system.

The ad campaign, financed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, announced the results of a study--based on a poll of 1,400 corporate lawyers--that ranked the 50 states by the "legal fairness" of their civil courts. "If your state didn't make the top of the list, you are probably paying for it," the ad's text warned.

Those are fighting words for JOANNE DOROSHOW, the executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy (CJ&D) a nonprofit organization with a self-described mission "to educate the public about the importance of the civil justice system and the dangers of so-called tort reforms."

As soon as the Chamber study was published, Doroshow and her staff went to battle stations, responding to media requests for comments and issuing a fact sheet titled "Devil in the Detail": It noted that the only lawyers surveyed for the study were corporate counsel and that the poll was "clearly designed to test responses to a set of arguments reflecting the Chamber's political agenda to limit class action lawsuits and the liability of corporate wrongdoers."

Doroshow has been on the front lines of the tort "reform" debate since 1986, when Ralph Nader hired her to direct a project on liability and the insurance industry. She later served on the Steering Committee of the Brookings Institution/American Bar Associations's Advisory Committee on the Future of the Civil Jury, and in 1997 she joined Public Citizen as a staff attorney and lobbyist on civil justice issues.

In 1998, Doroshow sensed that the country critically needed a national consumer rights organization dedicated exclusively to protecting the civil justice system, and she founded the CJ&D. Six year's later, the need for a clear, forceful, and effective response to the seemingly endless barrage...