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Tortdeform
TortDeform.com, the Civil Justice Defense Blog, confronts and transcends the arguments put forth by the tort "reform" movement, working to ensure that all Americans can access the courts.

• Launch of Tort Deform: The Civil Justice Defense Blog.
  

  Welcome to the launch of Tort Deform: The Civil Justice Defense Blog. This blog is being launched in order to offer an alternative, and we believe, more accurate analysis of the state of our civil justice system than that presently provided by the majority of legal commentary blogs.

  Over the last several decades, a relentless and more or less successful campaign has been waged by a collection of interests identifiable as the "tort reform" movement, aimed at closing the courthouse door to civil litigants as much as possible. This group strives to make it as difficult as possible for victims of corporate or other misconduct to sue and hold accountable in court those who harm them. Even more detrimentally, this same "tort reform" group has succeeded in shaping and leading important national narratives about the law and lawyers. Now, more than ever before in recent history, lawyers, lawsuits, and an overly litigious society are blamed for everything from the rising costs of health care to the state of the economy.

  This blog is being launched to right this imbalance, and to affirmatively engage the "tort reform" movement's ideas in a popular medium that is accessible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

  The myths:

  Question: Why are medical insurance premiums costs so high?
  Answer: Lawyers.

  Question: Why can't I get a good doctor in my community?
  Answer: Lawyers.

  Question: Why isn't the economy in my state improving?
  Answer: Lawyers.

  Question: Why is American culture disintegrating?
  Answers: Lawyers.

  Question: Why did my wife leave me?
  Answer: Lawyers.

• Who's Making Money off the Health Care Crisis?
  

  Since this is my first contribution to Tort Deform: The Civil Justice Defense Blog, before I get started in earnest, I thought I should introduce myself. I have been covering health policy and access to healthcare on Daily Kos for about two years. In the world of blogging, I have become the de facto health policy expert there.

  Those of you who may be familiar with me know that I work on a volunteer basis with an oncologist at a Manhattan hospital. I often write about what I witness first-hand--the daily assaults perpetrated by insurers against both insured and uninsured Americans who find themselves sick, vulnerable, and at the mercy of an unforgiving system.
  
  On Daily Kos, researching and writing about the American healthcare crisis always leads to this one question: How can the richest nation on the planet allow 47 million of its own citizens to go without basic healthcare services? Forty years ago, healthcare accounted for about 5 percent of GDP. Today it hovers around 16.5 percent. This is a flagrant example of government policies that are clearly not working and not good for America. Not having access to affordable healthcare is a black-and-white kind of issue. And what I discovered is that there are no "good" answers and an awful lot of bad ones. Or self-serving ones. And there's also just a lot of good old-fashioned lying and spin going on out there.

  These issues are important in and of themselves, but are also critical elements in the debate about "tort reform" and the causes of increasingly unaffordable healthcare in America. Right now the national narrative suggests that medical malpractice lawsuits are primarily responsible for skyrocketing medical costs, and the inability to provide all Americans with basic healthcare. In fact, the costs of malpractice premiums amount to about 1 percent of total U.S. healthcare expenditures. I will be taking a critical look at all the explanations for spiraling healthcare costs, and investigate the veracity of the present national narrative.

• Alan Morrison
  

  Professor Alan Morrison, Founder, Public Citizen Litigation Group & Senior Lecturer, Stanford Law School

  Regarded as one of the most respected lawyers to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, Alan Morrison focuses his scholarship on separation-of-powers issues, administrative law, and public interest law. He worked for over 30 years in the public interest engaging in a wide range of law reform litigation and brought cases to trial in areas affecting the separation of powers, the legal profession, and the control of federal regulatory agencies, among others. He is a member and past president of the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and an elected member of the American Law Institute. Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 2004, Professor Morrison was the director of Public Citizen Litigation Group, the Washington, D.C.-based consumer rights advocacy group he cofounded with Ralph Nader in 1972, and an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He has taught at New York University Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Hawaii.

  Read Archived Posts by Alan Morrison

• Allison Wall
  

  Allison Wall, Executive Diretcor, Georgia Watch

  Allison Wall was recently recognized by Georgia Trend magazine as a 2006 Notable Georgian, and by the Georgia Informer weekly newspaper as one of Georgia’s Fifty Most Influential Women of 2005.

  An Atlanta native, Mrs. Wall founded Georgia Watch, the state’s leading consumer watchdog in November 2002. Before starting Georgia Watch, she worked for United Parcel Service’s Public Affairs office in Washington, D.C. and advocated for stricter air pollution controls and healthier air quality statewide on behalf of the Rockefeller Family Fund. She has a B.A. degree in political science from the University of Georgia.

  Read Archived Posts by Allison Wall

• Cyrus Dugger
  

  Cyrus Dugger is Senior Fellow in Civil Justice at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a non-partisan, non-profit think tank generating the ideas that fuel the progressive movement.

  Cyrus is a recent graduate of NYU Law School. Before law school he was engaged in community development work for five summers as a volunteer, Project Supervisor, Assistant Project Director, and Project Director in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Honduras. In addition to his summertime work in Latin America, Cyrus spent a summer in Ghana performing research on matrilineal inheritance with Alliance International Research for Minority Scholars. Shortly after college he worked as a researcher at Massachusetts Voters for Fair Elections (a clean elections advocacy group) and as an intern at Political Research Associates (a research center dedicated to studying right wing movements). During law school Cyrus interned at Make the Road by Walking, the Socio-Economic Rights Project of the Community Law Center in Capetown, the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the New York State Defenders Association's Immigrant Defense Project, and the American Civil Liberties Union's Human Rights Working Group. His law school extracurricular activities included serving as Co-Chair of the NYU Chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild (2004-2005), Education Chair of NYU's Law Students for Human Rights (2004-2005), MCC Representative of NYU BALSA (2004-2005), and Co-Chair of NYU's Public Interest Law Foundation (2005-2006). In his last year at NYU, Cyrus served as an Articles Selection Editor for the NYU Review of Law and Social Change (2005-2006) and was selected as the Arthur Garfield Hays Roger Baldwin Civil Rights & Human Rights Fellow (2005-2006).

  Read Archived Posts by Cyrus Dugger

• Brian Wolfman
  

  Brian Wolfman, Director of Public Citizen Litigation Group

  Brian Wolfman has been Director and General Counsel of the Public Citizen Litigation Group since 2004, and was a staff lawyer with Public Citizen before, beginning in March of 1990. His practice areas include general appellate litigation, consumer health and safety, federal preemption, class actions, access to the courts, open government, and poverty law. Wolfman's teaching history includes an adjunct professorship at Harvard Law School from 2004 until the present, teaching an Appellate Courts Workshop; a position at Stanford Law School in January 2001 as an Irvine Visiting Lecturer in Law, teaching an Appellate Courts Seminar (from public law perspective); a position at Washington College of Law from Spring 1997 through the present, teaching courses on appellate courts and advocacy as an adjunct; positions at Georgetown University Law Center in Fall 1995 and Fall 1997, teaching courses on professional responsibility and appellat