Who Killed the Mass Torts Bonanza?
by: Alison Frankel
The American Lawyer
The power of the plaintiffs bar is on the wane in this country, and will be for a long time to come.
You won't hear many tort reformers admit it. They've done too good a job demonizing trial lawyers to let their bogeymen fade away. Twenty years ago, tort reform was an obscure movement with a funny name; today, politicians speak of “ending lawsuit abuse” or “eliminating frivolous lawsuits” -- tort reform by more felicitous names -- whenever they need a failsafe applause line. The movement's success has been a public relations masterpiece.
Institutional Response to Tort System Breakdown: Asbestos Enters a New Phase
by: Frederick C. Dunbar, Faten Sabry, Mary Elizabeth Stern
NERA Economic Consulting; New York
Most observers are familiar with the old aphorism that “there is law and there is asbestos law”—the notion being that legal protections for defendants were stripped away over time by both federal and state courts attempting to deal with asbestos litigation. A relatively benign interpretation is that courts had to find innovative ways to deal with overwhelming masses of claims, and many of these innovations backfired inadvertently. A less charitable interpretation is that results-oriented courts condemned defendants and insurers to pay even the most specious of claims without regard to traditional principles of justice. Whatever the reason, the failures in free enterprise and government safety regulation that created massive asbestos exposure were followed by a civil justice system response to the ensuing litigation that was, at best, highly flawed.
Minutes from the 2006 Winter Leadership Conference
The meeting of the Mass Torts Committee was held on Dec. 2, 2006 as part of ABI’s Winter Leadership Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. The program was lightly attended, however those present heard a discussion on the effect and current state of fraudulent-conveyance litigation in mass tort bankruptcies. The panelists included Adam Paul from the Chicago office of Kirkland & Ellis, Ted Swett of the Washington, D.C. office of Caplin & Drysdale and David B. Wheeler of the Charleston, S.C. office of Moore & Van Allen. As the firms of Messrs. Paul and Swett are usually on opposite sides in fraudulent conveyance litigation of this type, the discussion proved not only informative but at times very lively.