He'd changed his mind: There was no way this wouldn't be a tort disaster.
Whereas Europe employs regulations to gum up the gears of commerce, we use a tort bar.
Some of your sticker price is going to end up in the pocket of a tort lawyer.
But recent events open a window into how a tort claim becomes epidemic.
Finally, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce viewed this as a tort reform case, protecting corporations from further expensive cases in U.S. courts.
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Publicizing private facts about people is a tort, she says, and companies can be held liable even if the victim hasn't suffered a monetary loss.
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.
That this might be a tort case, an involuntary manslaughter case, a negligence case in which someone died as a result of an automobile accident case.
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.
"Damages in the U.S. are potentially of much larger magnitude than in other nations, " says Ted Frank, founder and president of the Center for Class Action Fairness, a tort reform organization.
They liked the complete package of business friendly taxes, regulations, a tamed tort bar, and a good supply of young engineers coming out of Mississippi State in Starkville.
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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.
In December the first two welding cases in a mass tort with 5, 300 claimants imploded amid charges of faked injuries.
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.
As DeGeorge pointedly noted in letters to companies that dared to challenge him, any insurer denying a claim is taking a chance that it will get hit with a nasty tort suit by the policyholder.
In March 2003 Tinseltown darling Erin Brockovich filed a mass toxic tort claiming that drilling on the field had created air contaminants that caused a cancer cluster among students, teachers and residents.
There is also a disregard for tort law and respect for ownership rights to assets.
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Mississippi is undergoing a highly charged tort reform battle, with Republicans squarely on the side of curtailing shareholder lawsuits.
No longer merely a vehicle for tort reform, the ILR is increasingly used to attack any law the Chamber dislikes.
These cases and many more like them are to be found at Overlawyered.com, a collection of tort law absurdities maintained by author and Manhattan Institute fellow Walter Olson.
As a bright young tort lawyer, he was elected to the Senate on his first try in 1998 and was picked to be John Kerry's running mate in 2004.
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Among other things, the government argued that the mere fact that auto manufacturers must comply with federal law when installing seat belts does not preempt a state law tort action.
Birth control drugs, for example, "are very low-risk but attract a huge amount of litigation because people don't perceive the benefits to be as great, " says Edward Richards, a professor of tort law at Louisiana State University.
His firm files 40 or more tort complaints a year, often involving infants born with brain damage.
The tree trunks, exposed banks and other hazards whizzing past represent a cornucopia of potential tort suits under U.S. law, yet somehow the Swiss manage to operate these runs without being sued into oblivion.
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Texas was a battleground for the tort reform movement in the 1990s, with pro-business conservatives eventually winning control of the Texas Supreme Court and reversing the state's image as a haven for plaintiff lawyers with exotic new theories of damage.
Now Alan Lange of Mississippi site YallPolitics (and co-author of Kings of Tort, a book on the scandal) has posted a massive document dump of emails between the Scruggs camp and its public relations agency, as made public in later litigation ( see also).
One possible new territory where preemption is not a big problem is litigation over environmental debacles. (Witness the recent extraction of money from gasoline refiners who damaged groundwater with a federally approved additive.) The tort mavens also talked about switching to securities law, a field not especially starving for practitioners.
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon hear arguments in a case that tests a philosophical question at the heart of modern tort law: If the cost of pursuing a lawsuit exceeds its value to an individual plaintiff, is that a bad thing?
Taxpayers are burdened by excessive municipal tort claims, a significant portion of which are based on fraud.
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