Word: torts
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That's how in 1995 Ronald Huber became one faceless plaintiff among 5,000 class members--"They viewed their clients as mere inventory," the 2002 complaint says of its defendants. These mass tort cases typically involve dozens or even hundreds of corporate defendants and thousands of plaintiffs. There could be a core of wrenching cancer cases, but many of the plaintiffs are healthy people who could prove that they had been exposed to asbestos. Publicity about the evils of big corporations and asbestos cover-ups helped make for plaintiff-friendly juries, especially in states such as Texas and Mississippi, where...
Whatever Bush may have thought of Lay, there's no doubt that each was useful to the other. As a free-market conservative, Bush championed causes dear to Lay's heart: energy deregulation and tort reform. And Enron has been Bush's largest campaign donor. Lay hired James Baker and Robert Mosbacher, prominent members of the first Bush Administration, after they left office. During George W.'s run for the White House, the candidate's staff and family used Enron jets 14 times (though Bush himself never...
...every level. So the Democrats, who usually balk at limiting the ability to sue, accepted the idea of an airline bailout--as long as it came with a mechanism to compensate victims. Oklahoma Senator Don Nickles, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and a longtime proponent of tort reform, pushed hard to limit how much the victims' families could claim, but he did not prevail...
...American Tort Reform Association, backed mostly by Republicans, has been lobbying since 1986 to limit noneconomic damages in some suits to $250,000. John Ashcroft, head of the Justice Department, pushed for such a cap on punitive damages when he was a Senator. But Feinberg, a Democrat, insists he was not pressured by the Administration to keep the numbers...
...American Tort Reform Association, backed mostly by Republicans, has been lobbying since 1986 to limit noneconomic damages in some suits to $250,000. John Ashcroft, head of the Justice Department, pushed for such a cap on punitive damages when he was a Senator. But Feinberg, a Democrat, insists he was not pressured by the Administration to keep the numbers...