Since 1950, the firm adds that the growth in tort costs has exceeded the expansion in gross domestic product by an average of two percentage points.
Mazda presents one of the most contentious issues in tort law today: Whether jurors applying state-law concepts of liability can essentially write their own safety regulations for manufacturers.
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Last year the U.S. State Department intervened in a Tort Claims Act suit seeking damages from ExxonMobil for work in Indonesia, warning the suit could imperil counterterrorism initiatives.
McConnell also cashed in on the biggest tort bonanza in history, the tobacco settlement.
They are part of the law of respondeat superior and accepted as established principles in civil tort situations.
Whether Obama or McCain wins in November, tort reform appears dead in Washington for at least the next two years.
Even in a tort-crazy nation it's hard to find a case where a jury ruled that a bat manufacturer was responsible for a fan's injury.
The reasonable investor, like the reasonable person in other tort suits, is an invention of the U.S. court system who generally possesses the extra-sensory power to detect, in advance, every bad outcome that might come from a certain course of action.
Enough, BP says, to settle all the claims of residents and businesses along the Gulf Coast and pay unknown billions in fees to lawyers who refused to miss out on the largest environmental tort in U.S. history.
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This would not, in other words, be the stuff of toxic tort litigation in any legal system but the American one.
In truth, tort reform would only hurt trial lawyers and would provide an immediate boost to the economy.
The fen-phen case, in all its turns, illustrates the conflicts and collusion that are inherent in mass-tort litigation.
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In December the first two welding cases in a mass tort with 5, 300 claimants imploded amid charges of faked injuries.
Some of my partners are active in the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA), which created one of these two reports.
In New Jersey, ever a trendsetter in finding new tort liabilities, lawyers now videotape will signings to head off lawsuits by disgruntled heirs.
Defendants in medical malpractice lawsuits might have the cards stacked against them in a court that tends to favor defendants in mass-tort suits.
One reason for Sherwin's success: In a classic tort case--this defendant injured that plaintiff--it's very difficult to prove whose paint is on the walls of an old house.
The charge is similar to those made by defendants in a mass tort involving silicosis, where a federal judge last June found that thousands of the cases were based on flimsy diagnostic work.
That's what happened in mass-tort settlements involving asbestos, Vioxx, fen-phen and other products, where lawyers cleverly bundled hundreds or even thousands of claims that might not stand a good chance in court with a few that threatened blockbuster verdicts.
Mr. GIULIANI: Fred was the single biggest obstacle to tort reform in the United States Senate.
Common sense and the principles of tort law in the American civil justice system are not always synonymous.
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Regulators and companies remember the fen-phen disaster, when a drug from Wyeth resulted in the biggest pharmaceutical tort ever.
There are foreseeable risks, and a duty to inform people of those risks that is fundamental tort law in America.
The main problem in America's tort system is not class actions, but rather punitive damages and the rest of it.
Yet multinationals increasingly live in fear of alien tort suits, as much because of the negative publicity as because of the high costs involved.
He says he has lowered property taxes, created tax credits for manufacturers and agriculture, reduced red tape and reigned in frivolous lawsuits through tort reform.
Tyrrell says that unlike with widely dispersed asbestos, the pattern in most toxic-tort cases is to settle with everyone living some critical distance from the source.
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The dance Illinois courts are doing around these cases is puzzling since tort law in most parts of the country is clear on a few essential elements.
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But with his meticulous detailing of the damages allegedly caused by sulfur-laced wallboard U.S. District Judge Eldon Fallon has established another multibillion-dollar tort case in the making.
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