Class-Action Showdown

A follow-up to Noah's anti-tort reform agenda. The WSJ has an interesting editorial on the Class-Action Showdown in Congress (subscription only). Some titillating excerpts include the following:

The political momentum has grown behind this reform because class actions have so clearly been abused. Creative attorneys round up plaintiffs from across the country and then file suit in a handful of jurisdictions known for their tort-friendly judges, juries and laws. This "forum shopping" both rigs trials in favor of plaintiffs and allows state judges to make national regulatory policy with their rulings.

Worse, the only real beneficiaries are the lawyers, who often walk away with millions in fees while their clients get next to nothing. In one (all too typical) mortgage escrow suit in Alabama against that famous Southern institution, the Bank of Boston, 700,000 plaintiffs "won" payments of a few dollars each. But about a year later they discovered that anywhere from $90 to $140 had been deducted from their meager winnings to pay the lawyers' legal fees of $8.5 million. Meanwhile, tort litigation costs U.S. businesses an estimated $130 billion annually that might otherwise be invested to create new jobs.
...
Our runaway tort system is a genuine problem that is causing economic harm and, far more important, is distorting the cause of justice. American politics typically responds to such problems, but in this case the power of the tort bar centered on the Democratic Senators has blocked even the most modest fixes. If even this compromise class-action reform fails this year, we'll know for sure that the issue deserves to be joined in this Presidential campaign.