What is Wrong With Tort Law
Despite seeing all kinds of major problems in tort law today, I have never been a huge proponent of many tort law reforms (though I support loser pays). I don't see why my ability to pursue legitimate damages in court should be curtailed. What all these tort law reforms never get at is this:
A Glendale jury on Friday cleared an emergency room doctor of
negligence and liability in John Ritter's death, holding he did
everything he could to save the comic actor. ... Jurors, who voted 9 to
3 against liability for Lee and Lotysch, said they were torn between
sympathy for Ritter's wife and children and their conviction that the
doctors were blameless.
The fact that the jury is at all conflicted on this point represents a huge miscarriage of justice, but this goes on every day in court. In fact, if the doctors had worked for Exxon, you can bet Exxon would have been paying despite being blameless.
What patients (and juries) really seam to want is bad outcomes insurance rather than malpractice insurance. This is in part born out by the fact that researchers can usually find little statistical relationship between truly bad doctors and the size of court malpractice payouts. Maybe the answer to malpractice insurance is to convert it to a workers-comp-like no-fault insurance systems that pays off on bad/unexpected outcomes following a fixed schedule and keeps everything out of court. The reduction in legal costs alone would be staggering.
