In a message dated 2/14/01 10:18:35 AM Central Standard Time, hal@finney.org
writes:
> According to a Feb 1 article in the Los Angeles Times, "We Aren't
> Seeing You in Court", America's litigation levels have levelled off
> and actually been falling in recent years, especially in California.
> Furthermore, the so-called litigation explosion was actually not much of
> an explosion after all.
This phenomenon is well known in the legal community. The "tort reform"
movement begun in the 1980s has begun to bear fruit in most jurisdictions.
My state, Texas, was known as a wildly "plaintiff-friendly" jurisdiction with
a leftist, actvist appellate judiciary in the 1980s. Through some
legislation and, more importantly, electoral backlash in judicial campaigns,
that activist bench has been completely replaced. These days, most of Texas
is known as a fairly "conservative" jurisdiction. I understand the same
thing has happened in California.
Interestingly, Jefferson's "laboratories of democracy" have operated just as
he and the other founders of the federal system envisioned: A few states have
actually gone in a contrary direction (Alabama and Mississipi notoriously
so), so that there continues to be a patchwork, evolving legal landscape in
the US on the question of how ready courts are to entertain novel legal
theories.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
ICQ # 61112550
"We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know
enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another
question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species."
-- Desmond Morris
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