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Carl Deal is a freelance journalist based in New York City. Joanne Doroshow is the executive director of the Center for Justice & Democracy. This article is based on their report, "The CALA Files: The Secret Campaign by Big Tobacco and Other Major Industries to Take Away Your Rights," published by Public Citizen and the Center for Justice & Democracy.
FOR THE LAST TWO DECADES, INSURANCE COMPANIES, manufacturers of dangerous products and chemicals, the tobacco industry and other major industries have been engaged in an effort to roll back the U.S. civil justice system. In nearly every state and in Congress, corporations and their insurers have waged a relentless campaign to change the laws that give sick and injured consumers the ability to hold their offenders responsible for the injuries they cause.
While most of their legislative initiatives have been stymied at the federal level -- where corporations have sought national laws to override the rights that states grant to injured parties -- the corporate coalition has had enormous success in the states themselves. Going state by state, they have succeeded in obtaining liability caps, elimination of various causes of action, and procedural rules making it much harder to sue wrongdoers.
The business-led effort to take away consumers' legal rights (called "tort reform" by its corporate proponents; "tort deform" by its pro-consumer opponents) has had at its helm the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) located in Washington, D.C. In turn, ATRA has contracted with APCO & Associates, one of the nation's leading "grassroots" lobbying/PR firms.
Because large corporations have found their message more effective when delivered by what appear to be citizen groups than when conveyed by business associations openly advancing their pecuniary interests, they have come to rely on a network of front groups, corporate-funded think tanks and industry-funded academics to articulate their message.
Among the national groups representing the corporate interests are organizations like Citizens for a Sound Economy, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Americans for Job Security, the Center for Individual Rights, the Federalist Society, the Manhattan Institute, the Competitiveness Enterprise Institute and the Washington Legal Foundation.
At the state level, more important has been a network of supposed grassroots organizations spontaneously formed to confront "lawsuit abuse." This network of local...