American Lawyer magazine recently published an interesting article analyzing the effect of politicals, business and lawyers themselves upon the tort law system in a variety of states, including Ohio. The article, subtitled “Tort reformers, business interests and plaintiffs lawyers themselves have hastened the end of the Wild West era,” is worth the read.
It talks a lot about the role of the American Trial Lawyers Association and notes that “ATLA began developing an expertise in state constitutional law, working under the umbrella theory that legislative meddling in the judicial process violated states’ separation-of-powers doctrines, says Robert Peck of the Center for Constitutional Litigation, a spin-off of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America. In 1995 ATLA hired Peck to head its legal department, and he launched challenges to sweeping tort reform laws in, among other states, Ohio and Illinois. In both, Peck eventually prevailed: The Ohio and Illinois supreme courts threw out the legislation.”
“‘The moment we won in Ohio, they began campaigning against the author of the opinion,’ says Peck, who spun off the Center for Constitutional Litigation from ATLA in 2001. ‘There was nothing I could do as a law firm.’ (The justice, Alice Resnick, was reelected but recently announced that she will not run again.) Peck does have a challenge pending in Ohio, where the legislature passed a new, but hardly changed, tort reform bill after the old law was struck down. His briefs cite some of the same constitutional deficiencies that led the Ohio Supreme Court to overturn the original law, but he doesn’t know how effective they’ll be this time: Only two of the justices who ruled in his favor in 1997 are still on the court.”
For the full text, please click here.
