The Litigious Society
Lieberma, Jethro K.
.............................................................................................................................................................. B O O K R E V I E W...
...Lieberman, who does not ignore these evils, that too much litigation is better than too little redress for innocent victims of automobiles, drugs, and all the risks inevitably created by modern technology...
...Thomas Sowell on How Not to Help Minorities George Gilder on Margaret Thatchez's "OneLegged Monetarism" Plus regular features like Market Forumpresenting in-depth interviews with leading figures in the world of economics such as Prof...
...This, however, is not the place for a discussion of the question whether too many "liberal" judges have displayed excessive solicitude for criminals and little or none for their victims...
...Or "wrongful pregnancy," a failure to prevent the conception of a healthy but unwanted infant...
...One hyperactivist judge, having decided that prisoners have a constitutional right to rehabilitation (which most criminologists have come to realize is in most cases impossible), threatened to order the state to sell property to finance his very costly retraining program...
...What has changed is the scope of judicial usurpation of the powers of the other two branches...
...Lieberman nor I think it ought to be abolished...
...Moreover, the maker of a defective product may not plead the usual tort defense that the plaintiff had not proved that his conduct, whether or not tortious, had caused the injury...
...For one thing, far more, and more complex, medical services are available to more people than was the case even twenty years ago...
...Name / Address 1 / City State Zip / / SP£CiAl...
...Beale (1699), which laid down a basic principle of the law of damages, were topers who got into a tavern brawl...
...But one wonders whether judges, not all of whom are experienced politicians, are really better fitted than elected officials to set priorities for the expenditure of what is, after all, a limited amount of public revenue...
...While most of the contributors shared a dedication to individualism and a dislike for collectivist ideas in any form, they presented a variety of viewpoints on many issues...
...Indeed, the constant expansion of the rights From the International Center for Economic Policy Studies, the folks who brought you George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty," comes a new monthly update on the latest developments in supply-side economics, as well as reports and essays on the best in contemporary...
...Take Baker v. Carr, the one-man-one-vote case, in which the Supreme Court ordered Tennessee to reform its allotment of members of the legislature among its counties, so that each county was represented in approximate proportion to its population...
...They direct in minute detail the operations of public schools, mental hospitals, and prisons...
...Paul Laxalt, and many others...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, EIIiott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Shmuel Moyal, Huntington Cairns, Eric Hotter, Anne Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Jeff MacNelly, Doris Grumbach, Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken, Brook Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, John Roche, John Chamberlain, William Satire, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Charles Homer, Edward Banf laid, Victor Leaky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohn, Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Hugh Kenner, George W. Ball, William Praxmire, Patrick Coegrave, Jean-Frangois Revel, Luigi Barzini, Tom Charles Huston, Clay La Force, Fred Silverman, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Dana Andrews, Richard Whaler, Richard Lugar, Henry Regnery, Charles Peters, John Lukacs, Leonard Garment, Michael Kinsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Glazer, Alan Reynolds, Antonio Martino, Colin Welch, Robert Bleiberg, Herb Stein, Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert Nisbet, James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Roger Roaenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, Dave Stockman, Richard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...the producer's only defense is that the consumer knew that the product was dangerous but chose to ignore the danger...
...Friedman's new Introduction and a cumulative index...
...The Spike, Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss's odd roman a clef about Soviet disinformation, is now selling briskly in paperback after lingering for months on the New York Times bestseller list...
...It's well-written and always topical...
...the question was not whether twisting the patient's neck to cure cancer was sound medical practice, but whether it was good chiropractic practice...
...Lieberman has not given the space it deserves (which would amount to a long book), is the steadily increasing readiness of judges, particularly federal judges and more particularly left-liberal federal judges, to use their injunctive power-the authority to command this or forbid that-to turn into law their personal notions of right and wrong...
...SIZES: / - Extra-Large __ Large - Medium _Small / / _ Enclosed is my check or money order of / 1 for additional T-Shirts...
...when it burst...
...This is, however, very strong medicine, not lightly to be prescribed...
...The largest dispenser of free medical care is the Veterans Administration, and the United States is also the commonest defendant in malpractice suits...
...In practice it does not encourage frivolous or harassing litigation, for no competent lawyer will invest his time (and money) in a case unless he thinks that it is meritorious enough to make recovery likely...
...The favorite technique is to set a very low threshold of medical expenses, in New Jersey only $200, above which the accident victim retains his good old common law remedy, including "pain and suffering...
...For cases that do in fact look like legal blackmail there ought to be provisions (as there are in some contexts under some statutes) obligating an unsuccessful plaintiff to pay the defendant's counsel fees...
...Of course the disposition of some judges to consider themselves as commissioned by the Constitution, or maybe God, to sit as the ultimate Gesetzgebers, the conscience of the state, is not new...
...Some of the other 7 percent no.doubt wish they had it but have management' whose malodorous reputations make them practically uninsurable...
...Limits could be placed on damage awards, especially for "pain and suffering," often a term of art meaning "counsel fees," . which is frequently the largest component of an award...
...Even when this requirement was relaxed, the victim still had the formidable problem of proving that the maker had been negligent, despite the fact that the plaintiff had no idea of what went on in the defendant's factory...
...The protagonists of Fetterv...
...A single manufacturer might be liable for the whole of her damages (with or without a right to seek contributions from other producers), or only for a part corresponding to his share of the market...
...About the only case in which the victim had a chance of recovery was the exceptional one in which a jury of laymen needed no expert witness to find that what the doctor did was below any imaginable standard of care-e.g., that the surgeon had removed the wrong kidney...
...All that restrains the more socially conscious federal judges is the fact that none of them has yet figured out a constitutional basis for a mandatory injunction creating new taxes, though some of them have come close...
...Perhaps the biggest problem of all, one that Mr...
...And, bless him, America's resident Cassandra, Allen Drury, has lately come out with the odd Hill of Summer, ' which extrapolates a complicated series of determined Soviet maneuvers and fatuous Western blunders issuing in a Soviet strategic checkmate against the United States...
...The Supply-Side Revolution Has Begun Find Out Where It's Going In The Manhattan Report A sampler from recent issues: Manhattan Report is published by ICEPS-the International Center for Economic Policy Studies...
...It is not true that "the common law itself developed through the antics of the tiny class of aristocrats...
...At any rate, Mr...
...But the latest version of the American Bar Association's Model Code of Professional Responsibility (formerly known as The Canons of Ethics) is singularly weasel-worded on the subject...
...Manhattan Report gives me an excellent update on the supply-side world...
...What is left brilliantly unclear is how hard the lawyer is supposed to try to enforce that obligation if a losing client doesn't pay...
...This looks very much like what used to be known as "champerty and maintenance" and was thought to be highly unethical...
...No-fault legislation could do much to reduce the cost of litigating fault (most of your liability insurance premium goes to the lawyers), but in all but one or two states the American College of Trial Lawyers and similar organizations (very powerful lobbies, for lawyers are grossly overrepresented in most legislatures) have managed either to defeat or emasculate such bills...
...In fact, the soi-disant "public interest" law firms, which are sometimes not quite so exclusively devoted to civic virtue or so indifferent to lucre as they like to let on, have shown considerable virtuosity in talking judges into allowing splendiferous fees-which, it will be noted, do not come from their clients, for they are commonly representing themselves...
...Likewise, there is very little evidence to support the assertion that there was a time when "no duty of care [was] owed to anyone...
...Struck by the professional quality of the murders and dogged ineptly by an underling whom he knows to be...
...Such statutes provide in substance that a physician who renders first aid in an emergency shall not be liable for anything short of gross negligence, or perhaps shall not be liable at all...
...In the last century, and indeed until about 1920, the general rule (to which, however, the courts invented more and more exceptions) was that the consumer could not sue a producer with whom he was not in "privity''-that is, unless he had purchased directly from him, which, of course, was very rarely the case with any kind of manufactured product...
...Lieberman has done a commendable job of describing and documenting a serious problem of which most of us were vaguely aware, but whose details and dimensions we didn't know...
...The Railroad Brotherhoods have managed to beat it off, and to retain their common-law tort remedy, for three quarters of a century...
...Others order busing programs which may require schoolchildren to spend two or three hours a day in transit, until the judicial zeal defeats its own object by stimulating "white flight" to localities so distant that the judge has to give up the pursuit...
...They confirm Jethro K. Lieberman's basic point, which is that we live in an ever more litigious society, with people running to court in numbers that would have been unimaginable forty years ago...
...Despite the general excellence of The Litigious Society there are, inevitably, inaccuracies and exaggerations...
...John R. Dunlap teaches English at the University of Santa Clara...
...O GORKY PARK Martin Cruz Smith 1 Random House 1$13.95 John R. Dunlap Over the past half decade, something odd has taken place in bestsellerdom...
...The million-dollar verdict, never heard of before 1962, now barely makes the newspapers...
...And yet it must be recognized that in some circumstances the courts are justified in stepping in to fill a vacuum left by the legislature...
...Alexander Haig, Tom Woife, James Jackson Kilpatrlck, Blll Bruce, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Wlll, J. Peter Grace, Maj...
...A New INDIVIDUALIST Review LiberryP~vss bberyClasszcs t New Individualist Review A LibertyPress Periodical Reprint With a new Introduction by Milton Friedman The New Individualist Review was published at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1968...
...Directors' and officers' liability insurance, commonly known as D & O, which did not exist in 1962, is now carried, in large amounts and at hefty premiums, by about 90 percent of large corporations, including 93 percent of those listed on the New York Stock Exchange...
...Dooley remarked some seventy years ago, "I do not care who makes th' law iv a nation if I can get out an injunction...
...Lieberman suggests, however, that a good bedside manner, a convincing appearance of friendliness and sincere interest in the patient's well-being, may still be an important preventive of charges of malpractice...
...The tidal wave of litigation clearly produces some evils, such as discouraging entrepreneurs from introducing new but perhaps unsafe technology, increasing the cost of medical care, and frustrating the development of new (or even old) sources of energy...
...Lieberman disclaims any intention to write a legal treatise, and such occasional lapses are pardonable, especially when for some of them he can cite the authority of people who do claim to be legal scholars...
...Management, of course, regards any such plaintiff as a "striker," attempting to extort a settlement by blackmail (which today is generally untrue), and not so long ago a lawyer who represented such nuisances was regarded as little if any better than a shyster...
...Legislatures and regulatory agencies, stimulated by Ralph Nader and his eager disciples, often seeking a freedom from risk which is either impossible to achieve or not worth the cost, have created innumerable private causes of action-OSHA, requirements for automobile safety equipment (we barely escaped having to pay for air bags), and, above all, environmental regulations, the source of suits which in length and complexity rival Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which complicate inordinately the formulation of a coherent and effective policy on energy, and which may thus do far more harm to the public interest than ever was done by the Chancery rules in the time of Bleak House...
...Some of the more bizarre (and unsuccessful) suits described by Mr...
...The other learned professions are not immune...
...Descriptions of the frightful conditions in some prisons and mental hospitals make me sympathize with judges who stretch their powers to correct them...
...The dramatis personae of the famous cases of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were often far from the nobility...
...George Stigier, Cong...
...Medical paranoia is vividly illustrated by the "Good Samaritan" acts which medical associations have lobbied through many state legislatures...
...Their intervention in such matters has not produced happy results: It is conceded even by Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (who is naturally a strong believer in public education), that today private schools, which are fairly free of such meddling, provide a better grade of education...
...Priseilla Buckley Managing Editor, National Revieit ORDER FORM / / / / Manhattan Report ICEPS / 20 W. 4Oth St...
...People whose suits are truly frivolous, brought mainly to harass or blackmail the defendant (though such suits are not very common), ought to be made to pay at- least his counsel fees...
...Albert Shanker...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 numerous, expensive, and often useless laboratory tests, recommending costly second opinions, and (in order to forestall charges that the patient was not adequately informed about the risks entailed in the therapy) by frightening him half to death with descriptions of all the horrible (though very unlikely) things that may happen if something goes wrong...
...One example, to which Lieberman devotes a longish chapter, is the injured consumer's action against the manufacturer of a dangerous product...
...Lieberman thinks excessive) are a significant factor in the rocket-like rise of the cost of health care, and pervasive fear of liability may even contribute to a deterioration of the quality of that care...
...But some courts have held that she could sue any manufacturer who could not prove that his product was not on the market at the time and place...
...Very recently the National Wildlife Federation, the Center for Law and Social Policy, and a few other lawyers, who had unsuccessfully sought to enjoin the Interior Department from leasing oil sites in the Beaufort Sea, nonetheless persuaded the judge to reward their zeal with nearly a quarter of a million dollars, based on hourly fees ranging from $45 to $125...
...Amid the usual potboilers that turn on corporate fraud, CIA turpitude, and neo-Nazi recidivism, a handful of bookstore biggies have pursued themes of Soviet intransigence, KGB perfidy, and Western insouciance about Soviet intentions...
...Gorky Park is odd too, but gorgeous: a detective thriller carefully researched for a Moscow setting and a Soviet backdrop...
...Some kinds of lawsuit that have in theory existed for centuries are now far easier to bring and win...
...Box 1989, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a i7 new Name L7 renewal subscription to The American Spectator for one year (12 issues) for only $18...
...If a tire was "defective, it doesn't matter that the user was doing 120 m.p.h...
...George Gilder do Lester Thurow Debate "The Productivity Problem" David Meiselman Debunks "Supply-Side Deficits" Hilton !(tamer do Lewis Lapham on Government Funding of the Arts Alrin Rabushka do Stuart Butler on Urban Enterprise Zones Lewis Lehrman on international Monetary Systems Special Offer: With all pre-paid subscriptions you are eligible to receive an "I'm a Supply-Sider" T-Shirt from ICEPS...
...B O O K R E V I E W S...
...Twenty years ago no one could have imagined suing a doctor for ''wrongful birth,'' to recover damages for the cost and mental distress inflicted on parents by the birth of a defective child, on the ground that the doctor negligently failed to diagnose the defect in utero and advise the parents of the possibility of an abortion...
...Nor am I aware off any instance in which a faith healer has been sued because his magic didn't work...
...To mention only a few, familiar to every lawyer who remembers his study of the history of the common law, Armory v. Delamirie (1722) involved a chimney sweep who had found a ring and a goldsmith's apprentice who tried to cheat him out of it...
...Hardcover $12.00, not available in paperback...
...I don't see much hope in "uniform federal legislation setting forth a standard of care" for manufacturers: It is hard to imagine the draftsmen producing anything much more precise than the common law's "reasonable care in the circumstances," and there would probably be just as much argument and just as many jury questions as there are today...
...Malpractice insurance is even offered to the clergy, although there is no example of a holy man being haled to court for professional incompetence...
...Literate prisoners (and many who are not, but who arouse the sympathy of zealous lawyers) can relieve the tedium of incarceration by research in the prison's law library and the composition of incessant petitions for habeas corpus...
...Indeed, modern practice apparently permits the lawyer not only to render his services without charge if he loses, but also to pay out of his own pocket other, often heavy, costs of litigation-expert witness fees, travel, printing, and so forth...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...But the KGB stands back, watchful, even as Arkady gathers evidence that puts the murder case far outside his usual investigative area (drunken family hatchet murders and the like...
...32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981...
...The Third World War, Sir John Hackett's odd 1977 mix of pseudo-documentary narrative and weapons-manual jargon, hit the top twenty in paperback after the Soviet- invasion of Afghanistan...
...Our hero, the Moscow militia's Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Yaailevich Renko -a tall, dark-haired Ukrainian, thin but somewhat paunched in his early middle age-chain-smokes through an elaborate investigation of a triple murder...
...Example: The drug DES, taken by pregnant women to prevent miscarriage, proved to be the cause of vaginal cancer in some of their daughters...
...Suddenly it's become almost chic to view the Soviet Union through lenses untinted by indulgent Western rationalism...
...The $10 million dollar verdict handed down by a jury, full of a philanthropic desire to do some thing nice for a victim so long as it can be done with somebody else's money, really makes no sense: It is much more than is needed to cover the medical expenses and lost earnings of even a paraplegic, and no amount of dollars can really make up for blindness or life in a wheelchair...
...When I was learning Torts before World War II, it was nearly impossible to sue a doctor, largely because the patient had to prove what the doctor did (which wasn't easy when the plaintiff was under general anaesthesia), and, if he got over that hurdle, to show by expert medical testimony that whatever the doctor did was not up to the standards of good medical practice in the community...
...So with medical malpractice, on which Lieberman spends another chapter...
...Likewise, a manufacturer may be largely denied the defense of contributory negligence-that the plaintiff's own fault was a cause of his injury...
...Lieberman describes and analyzes some of the major causes of the alarming hypertrophy of litigation...
...ful search and seizure) was entitled to a writ of habeas corpus-that is, an order springing him from the state pen...
...10018 / / Send me the next 10 issues o1- Manhattan Report at the / I subscription rate n1 512 per year...
...Congress could constitutionally curb the powers of federal judges, as it has done at least twice in the past when (as in the case of injunctions against strikes and peaceful picketing) it thought those powers were being abused...
...It does seem to me, however, that the contingent fee idea has been somewhat overstretched by federal statutes which authorize a judge to award fees to counsel in environmental suits whenever he finds that such disbursement of the taxpayers' money is "appropriate...
...Workers' compensation, under which employees are compensated without regard to the employer's negligence, but also without damages for pain and suffering, certainly cut the cost of paying the victims of job-related accidents, but it is probably today not really popular with labor...
...But Mr...
...They forget or dismiss as reactionary and "insensitive" Felix Frankfurter's wise observation that a Justice of the Supreme Court (or presumably any other judge) should not "sit like a kadi under a tree dispensing justice accordifig to considerations of individual expediency...
...In those days ordinary people entered a courtroom, or even a lawyer's office, timidly, unhappily, and only under the pressure of dire necessity...
...They formulate strict rules for protecting disruptive students from disciplinary action in the public schools, and for eliminating "cultural bias" in testing the pupils...
...To be sure, no court has yet allowed a suit, on behalf of a defective infant, for "wrongful life" -that is, the injury suffered by being born a Mongolian idiot instead of being aborted...
...The premiums for product liability insurance are so high that many small businesses prefer to "go bare" and take their chances on bankruptcy...
...But some of the new torts may result in substantial awards to the plaintiffs and large fees to their lawyers...
...Addi tional shirts are available at 54.95 each...
...Bruce Bartlett author of Reaganomics "Manhattan Report is smashing...
...A vote in rural Moore County had been worth nineteen in urban Hamilton County...
...It published articles by an unusually distinguished group of contributors, including F A. Hayek, William F. Buckley, Jr., Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Miues...
...a KGB informer, Arkady Renko can't understand why the KGB doesn't take the case off his hands-and he hopes at first to wash his and the militia's hands of the grisly business by finding evidence that would require him to turn the case over to State Security...
...They can order the sale of state property, or enjoin the use of public funds for what they regard as less desirable purposes...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.Q...
...Phillip Grimm, and many more...
...Still, there may be things that could be done to mitigate the evils without abolishing the new and fairer system of redress...
...New York...
...All orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...dollars...
...But there is no reported case in which a doctor has been held liable in such circumstances...
...A49 Indianapolis, IN 46250 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 lawyer may not pay any of the expenses of litigation, but he may "advance or guarantee" them, "provided that the client remains ultimately liable for such expenses...
...A victim of a dangerous drug may recover from every manufacturer in an entire industry, even though he cannot show which one produced the drug that injured him...
...A related phenomenon is that, whereas in the old days the doctor was often a personal friend of the patient, who was correspondingly reluctant to sue him, nobody feels that way about a Veterans Administration doctor or a specialist he has never seen before...
...13.95 Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...The clues lead him soon enough to the identities of the three murder victims (two Siberians, male and female, and one American male) and to his prime suspect, a wealthy and ruthless American furrier with chum 'Doubleday $14.95...
...here are other fertile fields for litigation, not mentioned in The Litigious Society, which forty years ago either did not exist at all, or produced only a scanty crop...
...is Richard Ely Professor of Law at Yale University...
...free-market thought...
...mother had taken many years before...
...Arguably the pendulum has swung too far...
...Lawyers are by no means bashful about suing other lawyers, and the cost of legal malpractice insurance has soared accordingly...
...Payment enclosed C; Bill me later Please Prim Address City State Zip x91 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 31 delivery unless the legislature comes up with funds to improve prison conditions...
...Order your subscription today and get a headstart on the economics of the 80's...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/LibertyClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...arat.ram-ttm--am--ttr-t+ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1981 29 Another major cause of the prosperity of lawyers is their unflagging fertility in the invention of novel causes of action...
...Anyone who, like me, regularly riffles through or even hefts the advance sheets (weekly paperback collections of new cases, federal and state) knows that they are getting thicker and heavier every year...
...One enthusiastic law professor has even suggested that nature itself-forests, lakes, mountains, wildlife-ought to have standing to seek injunctions against harmful human activities, with the lawyers for the fish or the trees being generously compensated by the defendants if the plaintiffs win, or perhaps even if they lose...
...And who are the mutilated victims...
...Lieberman is almost certainly right in suggesting that the size of liability insurance premiums is usually even greater than is justified by the risk...
...In another example of creative legal imagination, a very recent decision of Maryland's highest court, which might easily have gone the other way in a less conservative jurisdiction, refused to hold the estate of a suicide liable to his divorced wife, who claimed that by killing himself he had deliberately caused a substantial reduction in her alimony...
...There has, for example, been a lush growth in the number and variety of stockholders' suits against corporate management' and investors' suits based on common law fraud and violations of the federal securities laws...
...We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...Many doctors practice "defensive medicine" by ordering THE LITIGIOUS SOCIETY J ethro K. Lieberman / Basic Books...
...Moreover, the doctor was held only to the standards of the locality-a country blacksmith was not expected to know as much as a metropolitan specialist-and of his own ''school'' of medicine...
...If it were, there would surely be a helpful reduction in the caseload of the federal courts...
...By ingenious legal devices-notably a vast expansion of the rule of res ipso loquitur ("the thing itself speaks," meaning that if the court decides that common experience shows that particular injuries don't usually occur without negligence by the defendant, a mere showing that the injury occurred is enough to get plaintiff to the jury)-the courts in thirty years swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other...
...Today the most elegant firms on Wall and LaSalle Streets do not blush to file such suits...
...Usually, of course, the victim did not know which brand her Joseph W. Bishop, Jr...
...ALSO: Ronald Reagan, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worstttorne, 5.1...
...But there have been dissents in such cases, and there is a measurable possibility that some super-liberal court will manage to get around the intrinsic difficulty of asking a jury to decide whether it is worse to be an idiot than not to be at all...
...But such assumption of legislative power ought to be used with great restraint...
...They substitute themselves for legislatures, for School Boards, for Commissioners of Correction...
...Few physicians would take the stand against a colleague...
...Today the first effort of counsel for an injured worker is to look for some third party-say the manufacturer of the machine which hurt the employee-to sue at common law...
...Without it many impecunious victims of other people's misconduct would have no means of obtaining redress...
...Odd booksof-the-hour, all of them-useful, no doubt, for their unsentimental views of Russia's socialist experiment and possibly of interest to future cultural historians, but eminently forget table to future literary historians...
...It would be difficult or impossible to prove that his prescriptions for salvation were wrong...
...He was talking about the way in which the majority of the Supreme Court of those days wrote their own ultra-conservative economics into the Fourteenth Amendment, striking down legislative efforts to improve the conditions of labor...
...Obviously the Tennessee legislature, dominated by the country politicians, was not going to reform itself: Only the Court could intervene...
...The plaintiff and defendant in Weaver v. Ward (1617) were members of the London trainbands who were skirmishing with loaded muskets...
...They can threaten to order a general jail Who reads The American Spectator...
...Fortunately he was reversed...
...Lieberman-e.g., a suit by an Italian-American group to enjoin the Postal Service from issuing a stamp honoring Alexander Graham Bell, on the ground that the real inventor of the telephone was an Italian-are, as he recognizes, intended only to furnish publicity or kicks to the plaintiffs...
...The judges are not responsible for all of the crushing burden of litigation...
...But despite all the obvious evils created by the contingent fee system, neither Mr...
...This reprint edition includes all 17 issues of New Individualist Review together with Dr...
...All that need be said is that thugs and swindlers are at least as litigious as honest citizens...
...Thus, controversy runs throughout almost every issue of the journal...
...Three bodies are uncovered in Moscow's Gorky Park, buried together under the ice beneath the snow...
...Today he need show only that the product was "defective"-the brakes didn't work or the canned fish was full of salmonella bacteria-but not how it got that way...
...George S. Patton Iii, Fred Ikie, Philip Crane, Mark Russell, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patrick Buchanan, Elaln 5. Hatfield, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, William E. Simon, Malcolm S. Forties, Jr., Frank Shakespeare, Norman Mailer, Clare Booths Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Melvin Lasky, Nelson Poisby, Roger Milliken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, Sidney Hook, Jim Fellows, Edith Efron, Gen...
...Practically all of this litigation is fueled by the rule, by and large peculiar to the United States, that a lawyer can ethically take a case on a contingent fee basis-that is, if he loses his client owes him nothing, if he wins he gets a third or more of the recovery...
...The bodies are preserved by the freeze, but the fingertips are sheared off and the faces neatly flayed: a professional job, evidently, but who did it...
...OFFER: I would like an "I'm a Supply- / / Sider" 1'-Shirt...
...But on the whole I am inclined to agree with Mr...
...The premiums for liability insurance (which Mr...
...Some of the verdicts boggle the imagination-$125 million to the victim of a Pinto gas tank that burst into flames in a rear-end collision (though a niggardly court cut it down to $6.5 million...
...A high percentage of the present caseload of the federal courts, also overlooked by Mr...
...There are still other causes, no less important, for the enormous expansion of malpractice litigation...
...And though the personal morality of modern judges is very different, the principle has not changed...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr 5olzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Midge Decter, James Q. Wilson, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Krlstol, Henry Fairlie, Alan Abelson, Charlton Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Gertrude H lmmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...Lieberman, developed out of a 1939 decision of the Supreme Court that a convicted criminal who could persuade a federal judge that his conviction was tainted by some violation of his constitutional rights (e.g., an unlaw of criminals has meant that locking up a felon may involve half a dozen or more complex court proceedings...
Vol. 14 • September 1981 • No. 9
