Word: torts
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...large part by the executives who are often defendants in personal-injury lawsuits, promises to be "a President who is tough enough to take on the trial bar." Al Gore and the Democratic Party, who collect big contributions from trial lawyers, supported President Clinton's veto of a 1996 tort-reform bill backed by business interests. Advocacy groups are already running dueling TV ads. One suggests that lawmakers who would limit damages in lawsuits are out to deny victims of asbestos-related illnesses their just compensation, while another depicts trial lawyers as sharks in a feeding frenzy...
...trial lawyers in the U.S. are living large. Texas tort king Joe Jamail is widely known as the world's richest lawyer, with a net worth of $1.2 billion. When Frederick Furth, a top San Francisco trial lawyer, isn't litigating antitrust cases, he is engaging his passion for wine at his 1,200-acre Chalk Hill vineyard in Sonoma County, Calif. Wayne Reaud (pronounced Ree-oh) has used his hundreds of millions of dollars in fees from asbestos and other "toxic tort" litigation to buy the local newspaper and a chunk of downtown real estate in his hometown...
Critics offer a solution: tort reform. They have been pushing for years for restrictions that would make it harder for trial lawyers to collect large punitive-damage awards, which often far exceed the actual damages. Forty-five states have enacted civil-justice-reforms laws that limit such awards; and the Republican-backed Litigation Fairness Act, which is pending in the Senate, would make lawsuits filed by the government subject to the same procedures and laws that apply to injured persons...
Supporters of tort reform complain that trial lawyers are fighting it by contributing millions of dollars to the campaign coffers of sympathetic elected officials and judges. Last year trial lawyers gave $2.7 million in soft money to the national Democratic Party. Angelos personally gave $400,000. In fact, most of this trial-lawyer money went to Democratic candidates for Congress--the group that has been most instrumental in holding the line against national tort reform...
...would stand in front of the microphone, his body slightly hunched and his arms bent as if he were a boxer waiting to slap down his opponent's best shot. He was able to show off his expertise on education policy and say things like "I've been a tort-reformin' Governor and I'll be a tort-reformin' President!" and hear applause in response. "I like this," he told an adviser. "And I'm not bad at it either...