Madison County plaintiffs’ lawyer Evan Schaeffer writes, partially tongue in cheek:
Meanwhile, I’m working on a propaganda campaign of my own. I’m going to take ATRA’s term and turn it on its head. Rather than “judicial hellholes,” I’ll be focusing on those jurisdictions in which the playing field is tilted in favor of big business. I’m calling them “consumer hellholes.” What do you think?
Unfortunately for Evan, there will never be a proper analogue; in these hypothetical “hellholes”, even if they exist, consumers that prefer a court system unfairly biased towards plaintiffs can completely avoid the effects of reform by moving to such a jurisdiction. If tort reform really makes people worse off, then people will leave the states with reform for the states where the plaintiffs’ bar controls one of the three branches. In contrast, businesses have very little power to avoid being sued in judicial hellholes; and consumers who don’t live in the judicial hellhole have little ability to escape the detrimental effects that the hellhole has in crafting nationwide liability. The $500 “tort tax” on automobiles that covers the cost of the liability system has to be paid whereever a car is sold because the manufacturer can’t bar the buyer from taking the car into the hellhole forum.
What bothers the ATLA-ites is that consumers have shown that they prefer tort reform, and the benefits tort reform brings: judicial hellholes are consumer hellholes, because we all bear the costs of runaway litigation and its effect on the economy.
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