When Republicans, financed by their big business and insurance backers, tout tort reform, you can bet those reforms only benefit them. Many legislatures have passed GOP driven tort reform which resulted in many inequities to innocent victims. In the political rush to pass “reform”, unfortunate consequences of those changes are not always readily apparent. The tort reformers promised that changes to our historical legal principles would bring new business rushing to open up shop. Based on the surveys of state business climates I’ve seen lately in which Louisiana continues to rank near or at the bottom, those promises haven’t materialized, but our citizens are already paying a heavy price.
The 1996 tort reform legislation eliminated solidary liability in Louisiana, a decades-long legal principle which allowed an injured party to collect their full damages from either negligent party when more than one defendant caused the harm. This concept allowed the innocent victim to collect 100% of their damages from either of the guilty parties. This protected the victim from having the burden of pursuing them both or face the possibility of not collecting in full if one defendant was insolvent. Under the “reforms”, if one of the guilty parties is insolvent, the victim doesn’t collect and is not made whole.
The current litigation involving defective Chinese drywall is a classic example of tort reform gone wrong. Since the Chinese manufacturers are outside the reach of American courts and civil judgments are not enforced in China, they can simply ignore the scores of lawsuits filed by innocent homeowners. To add insult to injury, many of the homeowners had their homes destroyed by hurricanes and rebuilt using the defective drywall. They now face the reality of having to tear out the drywall and affected wiring and plumbing and start over. So, in the Republican zeal to entice more business to our state, long-held legal concepts were tossed aside and innocent victims are left with the consequences. And where is all of that new business we were promised?
