Word: trubek
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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...villains in such melodramatic language. "The Chief Justice has a lot of important and valid comments," concedes David Shrager, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America, "but it is absoutely inexcusable to use phrases such as 'procurers' and 'hired guns.' " Indeed, says David Trubek, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, the average lawyer is nothing like the person Burger describes. "The Chief Justice calls up an image of a public ready to sue at the slightest provocation, assisted by greedy lawyers and abetted by incompetent judges," says Trubek. "This is a fallacy...
That opinion is based on 3½ years of research by Trubek and other scholars who worked on the Civil Litigation Research Project, funded by the Justice Department. Among other things, the survey traced how potential legal disputes were resolved in 5,000 households in five different U.S. judicial districts, and some of the results are summarized in the current issue of the U.C.L.A. Law Review. The conclusion: the litigation "mania" that Burger has complained about does not exist...
...Trubek admits that there are many frivolous suits, abuses of discovery, and unethical lawyers, but denies that these are typical. "Evidence for most of the claims that we are an overlitigious society is weak at best," he says. Wisconsin Law Professor Marc Galanter, who has studied Trubek's research as well as other data on how Americans resolve their differences, is even more emphatic. The alleged litigation explosion, he says, is "a strong admixture of naive speculation and undocumented assertion." Shrager believes that the latest research finally gives support to trial lawyers after years of criticism from the Chief...