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Connor then goes on to enumerate–at great length and not inconsiderable pomp–the myriad reasons for the importance of the tort system, which most thoughtful readers would both agree with (possibly punctuated with a “duh”) and recognize as completely irrelevant to the argument. No one in either the Fox Business News or ABC segments, nor Stossel himself in a follow-up article, is advocating the elimination of torts, so one is left at the end of this very long exposition (which probably should have started with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….”) asking “Yes, and your point?”
Moreover, as Mr. Connor should well know, the abuses that Stossel and others criticize have nothing to do with the general guidelines of the Constitution. One could as well argue that condemning armed robbery is an attack on the Second Amendment. No, the catalyst that has transformed tort law into a form of lottery, and made the predations of trial lawyers possible, is case law–which a cynic might define as a series of incremental precedents, based on highly imaginative interpretations of the Constitution, designed to codify whatever piece of social engineering judicial activists think is good for us that day.
If Mr. Connor insists on waving the Constitution under our collective noses, he’ll need to point out those articles or amendments—that have so far eluded me— that deal with:
- “the right to relief based on arbitrary, emotional and wholly subjective definitions of ‘damages’” (also known as pain and suffering),
- “the right to relief based on factors explicitly unrelated to damages incurred but seen as a social or political moral imperative” (also known as punitive damages) and;
- “the right to seek redress without risk or responsibility” (also known as contingency fees).
All of these, by the way, entirely at odds with his own definition of torts below:
… a private or civil wrong, with the added implication that the wrongdoer is required to compensate an innocent party for damages suffered as a result of the wrongdoing. [Emphasis mine.]
The real issue, notwithstanding Connor’s best attempts to conflate it with the specter of anarcho-conservative types peeing on paintings of Benjamin Franklin, is not whether people have the right to sue in a manner set forth by the Constitution but whether that system has evolved into a form of legalized extortion that would be unrecognizable to the framers and founders of that selfsame Constitution.
That’s the question worth asking. To paraphrase the last line of Mr. Connor’s article— it’s too bad he couldn’t bring himself to do that.
