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Undoing the tort 'reform' twist.

Article Excerpt
Editor's note: Shortly after publication of the 71-chapter; multivolume ATLA's Litigating Tort Cases (ATLA Press/Thompson-West 2003), a small portion of a chapter, "Juror Bias, "set the tort "reform" propaganda machine in spin: Over several weeks, conservative news outlets published deceptive articles that took brief excerpts out of context and grossly misinterpreted them.

The melee began with the Republican Study Committee's quoting those excerpts on its Web site.(1) Then Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) issued a press release titled "Tancredo Says It's Time: De-Fang Trial Lawyers," (2) and many conservative organizations perpetuated the misinterpretation on the Web. News outlets including CNSNews.com and the National Review published opinion pieces, followed by editorials in newspapers including the Wall Street Journal. (3)

Here the chapter's author, a noted authority on juror bias and decision-making, responds--and proposes how to stop the cycle.

The goal of "Juror Bias" was to help trial attorneys identify and strike biased jurors, select the least biased ones, and communicate persuasively to those selected. The intent was to help trial lawyers identify jurors who are likely to apply standards of personal responsibility equally to both sides, ensuring a fair trial for both plaintiff and defendant.

The chapter sets forth principles for jury selection based on observations gleaned from years of experience practicing law and researching jury decision-making. My research with the multivolume project's coeditor, Greg Cusimano, resulted in development of a juror bias model. That model is based parry on the perceptual lenses that jurors apply in deciding cases--lenses that can bias juror decision-making against plaintiffs, their lawyers, and the civil justice system.

These widespread biases stem from the business and insurance industries' sustained crusade to make jurors far more suspicious of plaintiffs than of defendants, a prejudice so ingrained in the juror pool that it greatly reduces the risk of a jury's holding...

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