Thomas Geoghegan’s See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation was, as Peter Lattman notes, reviewed favorably by Adam Liptak this weekend.
A working paper of my rebuttal is available on SSRN.
Did the Right Make America a Lawsuit Nation?: Thomas Geoghegan’s See You in Court
Thomas Geoghegan’s See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation was, as Peter Lattman notes, reviewed favorably by Adam Liptak this weekend. A working paper of my rebuttal is available on SSRN.
2 Comments
From Liptak’s review:
“The reason there is so much tort litigation, Mr. Geoghegan says, is that workers and others no longer have contracts they can enforce. Lacking contracts, they are reduced to making wild allegations and asking for extravagant damages in suits that mostly fail but that sometimes pay off like a lottery ticket.”
Huh? As noted elsewhere, any lawsuits that might serve as a substitute for this area would be a tiny fraction of the overall number of lawsuits. Worker’s compensation systems, for instance, preclude suits in many states for on-the-job injuries, and race-and-sex-based discrimination claims are absolutely, positively a result of liberal politics, not conservative. Poverty or the evils of capitalism as an explanation for the tort explosion don’t explain why we didn’t have a lawsuit-crazy country during the Great Depression.
The right, meanwhile, champions self-reliance, business success and the restraint of complaint, not greedy, whiny, state-power invoking lawsuits.
The analysis is simple … just review the political contributions made by tort lawyers.