The Hellhole attack is central to this PR campaign. While it claims to be a valid analysis of our nation’s courts, it’s not — and even its authors admitted that to the New York Times. The Times challenged the 2007 study, writing, “The question is whether the report’s arguments make sense, are supported by evidence and are applied evenhandedly. Here the report falls short ... It has no apparent methodology.” In response, American Tort Reform Association admitted that “we have never claimed to be an empirical study.” In her study of West Virginia’s courts, Elizabeth Thornburg wrote, “The explicit goal [of the Hellhole Report] is to appeal to the public as voters, to scare state politicians into making pro-defendant changes in the law in order to make the label go away, and to get rid of judges whose rulings made ATRA members unhappy. Judicial Hellholes are selected in whatever way suits American Tort Reform Association’s political goals. The choice is not based on research into the actual conditions in the courts ... The point of the hellhole campaign is not to create an accurate snapshot of reality.” That “accurate snapshot of reality” is very different from the Hellhole propaganda.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Dec 2014 14:10:31 +0000
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