Civil and Administrative Law

¶ … Torts in the Civil Court System

Within the American judicial system it is necessary to differentiate between actions committed by an individual which cause suffering, harm or loss to another person, and those which cause injury to society at large. The latter case, in which a crime affects the general public interest, is encompassed by the expansive United States criminal code, while the more delicate issue of determining liability in personal disputes is covered by the country's civil court system and its unique system of addressing torts. The legal term tort is derived from the Middle English for injury and has become entrenched in common law jurisdictions as a viable means to settle legal disagreements between two parties. Today tort law is the preferred tool with which judges, courts and magistrates apportion responsibility for an array of injurious actions, such as breach of contract, dereliction of duty, negligence, defamation of character and neighborly nuisance. In the even that a particular party is found to be liable for unfairly causing the aggrieved party any form of legal injury, tort law typically mandates that damages be recompensed in the form of monetary compensation. This practice has proven especially necessary in instances where a company or corporation neglects to adhere to regulatory statutes, inflicting legal injury on its customer base in the process, by providing ordinary citizens with a direct avenue to petition the court for redress. Another primary mandate of the civil court's system of tort law is to discourage individual negligence by holding a person accountable for carelessness, recklessness or inattentiveness in the social realm by requiring an adherence to the standard of reasonable care.

While the concept of tort law is an undoubtedly an essential pillar of American jurisprudence, its application has garnered an increasing amount of controversy in past decades as unscrupulous attorneys and litigious plaintiffs have found myriad ways to manipulate the system. A particularly contentious wave of tort litigation in the 1990's spawned a number of extravagant, multimillion dollar awards for damages, and the ambiguous catchall phrase "pain and suffering" began to be attached to any number of tort cases by parties seeking financial recompense. As no standard scale has been set with which to adjudicate an individual's personal sense of pain and suffering, wildly disparate rulings were made across the country by judiciaries vainly struggling to enumerate emotional damage. Punitive damages in excess of a billion dollars have been awarded to victims in sensationalized situations, such as the infamous case of the Los Angeles County jury which levied a $4.8 billion in punitive damages against General Motors in 1999 to six burn victims. Although a judge reduced this penalty to $1.2 billion upon appeal, the fact that tort law has increasingly resulted in grossly exaggerated punitive sums such as this has fueled the ongoing debate over national tort reform. Advocates of reforming the tort law system point to the danger of so called quota litis agreements made between lawyers and clients, pacts which guarantee a predetermined share of any punitive award to the attorney pursuing the case. Because quota litis agreements incentivize the pursuit of massive punitive awards by clients and lawyers alike, tort reform proponents have called for the American legal system to adopt ethical guidelines similar to those in place in the European Union. The advent of class action lawsuits, in which a group of claimants band together with the assistance of one lawyer to pursue a similar claims simultaneously, has also spurred many legal minds to question the efficacy of modern tort law. Considered unethical by nearly every jurisdiction worldwide but the United States, class action lawsuits have become perhaps the most divisive component of the tort reform debate.