Food for thought: As a lawyer who makes a living when folks become involved in lawsuits, I still ardently believe that lawsuits are one of the worst ways to resolve a dispute. Of course at times it is also the only way lawfully to resolve a dispute. And in those cases lawsuits are both effective at resolving disputes and non-violent, which is a great improvement over the days of walking out in the street and shooting your neighbor to resolve things. Currently there is public debate about whether one person or group should be able to sue another. There is debate in Louisiana over whether the Legislature should deprive a political board of its ongoing lawsuit against certain oil industry interests. And there is controversy up North about whether a child should be able to sue her parents for financial support. Setting aside the merits of those lawsuits, I am more concerned about the idea that an effective PR campaign or legislation should be used to decide who gets to sue and who doesnt. This concerns me because being able to sue someone, as distasteful as it may sometimes be to some, is one of the most important and highly evolved features of our government that helps people while it helps to keep the peace. For those who havent studied civics in decades, please remember that the things that distinguish America from less desirable places to live are your freedoms, privileges, and rights. And central and most important among those freedoms, privileges, and rights are voting and suing for help. Think about those two, voting and suing: If you dont get to vote, you have no say in our representative democracy about how things will be done; if you dont have the ability to walk down the street and file a lawsuit to get help when you need it, you have nothing to fight with short of violence or begging a politician to do you a favor, and neither violence or bribery properly belong in a civil society (although bullies and corrupt politicians would have you believe otherwise). There are groups in our society who put a lot of stock in discouraging lawsuits (also referred to as litigation); not surprisingly those groups tend to have a lot to lose. Why do these groups with a lot to lose discourage litigation? Well, think about this: who else is more likely to be the target of a lawsuit to correct an unjust act if not someone who has unjustly gained? For example, if our auto insurer collects premiums from us to pay for our accidentally injuring someone with our car and then that insurer refuses to pay a fair compensation to the injured person, they are unjustly enriched; likewise, when an oil pipeline company, which makes a healthy income from pipeline operations that risk serious injury to the public, has a pipeline leak that injures folks or evacuates them from their homes and does not compensate its victims. Such groups are in fact interested in limiting the rights of victims (people who must file lawsuits to get justly compensated for what has been taken from them). Think of the money these well to do groups, like auto insurers and large industry interests, spend to discourage lawsuits. But the point here though is not that insurers, pipeline companies, or anyone else is always unfair - to be sure there are times they are fair and without any suit being filed. The point here rather is that if we people, we citizens, lose the ability to walk into court to ask or petition for help with a problem and thereby force society to pay attention to our problem and help us get our problem resolved fairly, then what are we to do? If we could not go to court to get help with our problems, why would we stick around in this so-called representative democracy we call America and pay taxes? Why would we serve and die in its military? Why would we support it at all? Maybe its time we call the tort reform movement by a more accurate name: the age-old movement for taxation without representation. Lets see the Tea Party support that.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 17:29:37 +0000
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