Quote:
Originally Posted by bvtaylor
The right to sue any corporation should not be arbitrarily legislated against. That's just dangerous.
As one legislator commented, if the lawsuit is frivolous, it will be thrown out of court.
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After the defendant has already paid through the nose for lawyers. I'm not saying that industries should be totally immune to lawsuits, but it seems to me that the lawsuit industry is the only one that cannot be easily sued - to almost no one's shock.
Many of the large, abusrd rulings are thrown out or reduced upon appeal, as well. The massive legal fees and insurance costs everyone pays to enrich trial lawyers is in every insurance and medical bill we pay, built into the costs of every product we buy.
I'm not big on "tort reform" as is often run up the pole by Republicans. But there should be common sense...on its face, a fast food company shouldn't have to deal with suits filed that have no prayer of success.
We can ignore it, but have you tried to have a baby delivered in the last five years? The lawsuit industry is driving many doctors out of that business.
I'd be happy with something that checked the lawsuit industry's ability to use courts as a weapon, a weapon we subsidize for them, by applying common sense standards to whether a suit can be filed at all, before defendants would ever have to hire a single lawyer.
Fast food suits, in my opinion, seem to fit that criteria to some degree. Fast food makers aren't the same as tobacco companies, who have a paper trail of deception and lethality.
Screwing the public runs both ways. The trial lawyer industry has been doing it for years, and deserves some better oversight in the ways that they can appropriate public resources as a subsidized weapon.
At very least, I'd love to see lawyers that specialized in doing to other lawyers what they do to most businesses. Of course, since lawyers make up the judiciary, that won't happen.