Can States Reform Torts?
While Congress has failed to enact meaningful tort reform in the last four years, individual states have passed a surprising number of reforms. Even states containing the so-called “hellhole jurisdictions” like Texas, Mississippi, and Ohio are moving to curb the tort explosion. What have these states done and why have they done it? Leading advocates of tort reform at the state level and an economist with expertise in mass torts reviewed the recent history and examined the potential and the limitations of state-based reforms at an October 5 AEI conference. Michael Greve AEI It is common to think of the tort crisis as a crisis of substantive tort doctrines–for instance, the invention of enterprise liability, as described by George Priest. However, I would argue that the crisis has as much to do with the crisis of federalism as it has to do with the crisis of torts themselves. Given the number of multi-state transactions in a federal system, the degree to which a plaintiff may choose his
