Word: torts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Adapting a best seller for the movies is like carving flesh down to bone. You keep the skeleton, then apply rouge and silicone until the creature looks human. Any screenwriter adapting the 500-page novel The Firm, John Grisham's tort thriller about tax attorneys fronting for the Mafia, would try to streamline the story, infuse action into a narrative that is mostly lawyers chatting, give an emotional history to characters who are basically plot props and . . . please, a new ending. Grisham spun a lovely yarn -- the venality, the conspiracy, the flypaper guilt -- then let it unravel at the denouement...
That happened in 1987, and the tide of petty American litigiousness has kept on rising to new, absurd heights. This is the age of the self-tort crybaby, to whom some disappointment -- a slur, the loss of a job, an errant spouse, a foul-tasting can of beer, a slip on the supermarket floor, an unbecoming face- lift -- is sufficient occasion to claim huge monetary awards...
...what to think, for example, about the new area of litigious behavior that has blossomed and might be dubbed emotional tort law? Last March Julie Rems, 26, who is deaf, competed in the early rounds of a Miss America contest in Culver City, Calif. Though she was warned that Miss America rules precluded anyone assisting her onstage, Rems nonetheless brought on an interpreter who helped her lip-read questions. Rems lost the contest and sued the pageant committee and others, charging violation of her civil rights as well as "embarrassment, humiliation and degradation." The case has not yet come...
...made the lawsuit business a battleground for greedy practitioners. The survey firm Jury Verdict Research estimates that jury awards to plaintiffs of $1 million or more leaped from 22 in 1974 to 558 in 1989. Those figures may be one reason why Congress is now considering a national tort-reform law aimed at restricting frivolous litigation. There is surely something new in the American air that inspired the estate of Christopher Duffy of Framingham, Mass., who stole a car from a parking lot and got killed in a subsequent accident, to sue the proprietor of the lot for failing...
...Supreme Court has given limited constitutional protection to falsehoods in order to give the truth some breathing room -- to protect honest mistakes. In a tort-crazed nation, this is a great luxury. In other countries journalists live in fear of lawsuits. In America all professionals except journalists live in fear of lawsuits. Journalists are rightly alarmed that the mere accusation of fake quotes could land a journalist in a costly lawsuit, and the Supreme Court should protect us against that. But if quotes are made up, this alone surely displays reckless disregard for the truth. The claim of Malcolm...