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Special points of interest:
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Personal Injury Lawyers Target Michigan Reforms
A new report released this month by the Manhattan Institute as part of their “Trial Lawyers Inc.” series highlights the stepped up legal assault on Michigan’s successful legal reforms, including medical liability reform. “Michigan on Trial: Litigation Industry Looks to Recapture Great Lakes State,” focuses on the formidable lobbying and public-relations resources that personal injury lawyers have marshaled to take back the courts, most recently as part of the efforts to unseat “Top Target” Supreme Court Justice Clifford W. Taylor, an expert in tort law who has been at the forefront of the effort to improve the legal climate in Michigan.
The report warns that if personal injury lawyers are successful in turning back the clock on Michigan’s reforms, “the consequences for Michigan’s already suffering economy could be severe.” You can read the full report here.
Elsewhere, it’s been a mixed bag this month in the on-going legal battles by personal injury lawyers to overturn medical liability reform: in Maryland, the firm of uber-personal injury lawyer and owner of the Baltimore Orioles, Peter G. Angelos, lost its challenge to Maryland’s medical liability limits (and have announced plans to appeal); while in Arizona an appellate court ruled that a state law requiring that expert witnesses in medical liability cases actually be qualified in the field they are testifying about was ruled unconstitutional. Read more here.
More Proof of Why We Need National Medical Liability Reform
One might expect that these continuing challenges to reform at the state level by personal injury lawyers would be reflected in higher medical liability insurance premiums, as insurance companies account for the possibility that laws limiting non-economic damages may be over-turned in the courts. Indeed, a new study, “How Tort Reform Affects Insurance Markets,” that surveys the entire field of tort reform finds just such an effect, to wit: “…premiums may not fall if insurers do not expect the reform to withstand judicial scrutiny.”
The “stickiness” of insurance premiums even after reforms pass has often been cited by personal injury lawyers in their arguments against reform, but as this study shows, some 40 out of 148 reforms passed since 1985 have been overturned. As we’re seeing on the medical liability front, these challenges will never end until federal law makes them moot. You can read the full story here.
Good Reading
This posting at Americancourthouse.com neatly eviscerates the phony “even-handedness” of the Center for American Progress, which carefully examines both sides of the medical liability reform debate and “invariably agrees in every particular with the personal injury lawyer lobby.”
A good quote: “The CAP’s item “The Jury’s Still Out: A Critical Look at Malpractice Reform,” concludes that discussion of medical malpractice reform is only a distraction from the more important issue of patient safety. Perhaps they could tell us in a “balanced” way how you can protect patient safety if there are no doctors or hospitals or maternity wards to treat the patients in the first place.”
You can read this and other great posts at: http://americancourthouse.com/2008/06/24/adding-some-balance-to-the-caps-balance.html
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