Do As I Write, Not As I Do
Remember when Robert Bork was preaching the gospel of Tort Reform? Thou Shalt Not Sue for Frivolous Punitive Damages and all that?
Those days have passed, it seems.
Judge Robert Bork, one of the fathers of the modern judicial conservative movement whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate, is seeking $1,000,000 in compensatory damages, plus punitive damages, after he slipped and fell at the Yale Club of New York City. Judge Bork was scheduled to give a speech at the club, but he fell when mounting the dais, and injured his head and left leg. He alleges that the Yale Club is liable for the $1m plus punitive damages because they "wantonly, willfully, and recklessly" failed to provide staging which he could climb safely.
Judge Bork has been a leading advocate of restricting plaintiffs' ability to recover through tort law. In a 2002 article published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy—the official journal of the Federalist Society—Bork argued that frivolous claims and excessive punitive damage awards have caused the Constitution to evolve into a document which would allow Congress to enact tort reforms that would have been unconstitutional at the framing:
State tort law today is different in kind from the state tort law known to the generation of the Framers. The present tort system poses dangers to interstate commerce not unlike those faced under the Articles of Confederation. Even if Congress would not, in 1789, have had the power to displace state tort law, the nature of the problem has changed so dramatically as to bring the problem within the scope of the power granted to Congress. Accordingly, proposals, such as placing limits or caps on punitive damages, or eliminating joint or strict liability, which may once have been clearly understood as beyond Congress's power, may now be constitutionally appropriate.
So, it's somehow a crime against sanity for a woman to be given $2.7 million (reduced by the trial judge to $480,000) in compensation for third-degree burns that required skin grafts and a week in the hospital, but it is well and proper to sue for over $1,000,000 because of a hematoma to one's leg. What a brave new world that has such thinkers in it!
Labels: Robert Bork, Stupid Republican tricks, tort "reform"
