The Rule of Lawyers
by Walter K. Olson

Walter Olsen is not fond of lawyers. He thinks that plaintiffs’ attorneys have seized far too much power and wielded it with destructive rapacity.

In the watershed tobacco litigation, politically connected tort lawyers teamed up with the attorneys general of several states to effectively impose a huge excise tax on the smoking class. Little of the money that actually made it to the states (after lawyers’ fees) has been spent on the promised smoking abatement problems; states are now busily collateralizing their future revenue streams to fund their 1990s spending orgy.

Asbestos is another 800-pound gorilla stomping through the legal arena. Trial lawyers, by coaching witnesses to lie and using junk science to persuade dumbed-down juries, have created a monster that is vaporizing companies with little or no connection to asbestos, while ensuring that the truly injured will never be compensated.

Punitive damages represent a once-sensible idea taken to a preposterous extreme. Should a dispute over a $6,300 paint job on a car yield a $1.5 million verdict? Should a business dispute over a dealership worth $6 million turn into a $1 billion verdict?

Tort law has morphed into a perpetual motion machine of destruction. Huge verdicts for often-imaginary damages fuel ever-larger verdicts. Trial lawyers become key contributors to election races for the judges who will preside over their next cases.

Olsen provides interesting insights on why the most plaintiff-friendly courts seem to be in the South: lacking a manufacturing and commercial base for campaign contributions, politicians turned to trial lawyers. The result was a new industry; hence the contributions/judges/verdicts cycle that has arisen in Mississippi, Texas, West Virginia and Alabama. Fans of our jury system will be dis-heartened to read about the real mechanics of jury selection by ingenious members of the plaintiff bar.

Olsen calls attention to the irony of a federal government that micromanages every aspect of hiring and firing at the local hardware store but refuses to rein in the chaos of mass tort litigation. And the landscape is littered with the carcasses of failed tort reform legislation. The author has no magic solutions other than electing representatives who will fight for the common good.

(St. Martin’s Press, 314 pps., 2003, $25.95)