Public Citizen Slams Chamber of Commerce re Frivolous Lawsuits
January 9th, 2012. By AbiK
The U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform recently issued the results of its “Most Ridiculous Lawsuit of 2011″ poll. According to FacesofLawsuitAbuse.org, the list showcases “the most egregious examples of frivolous and abusive litigation from around the country”.
The list, however, is not compiled for the sake of humor. It’s compiled as part of the US Chamber of Commerce’s agenda to ultimately curtail consumers’ access to the courts—in order to alleviate the impact that ‘frivolous’ lawsuits have on “businesses, families, and everyday Americans through lost time, money and job growth.”
Sounds good, right? Until you take a look at the list—as Public Citizen’s Congress Watch Research Director, Taylor Lincoln did—and realize that it includes a bunch of lawsuits that never went anywhere and probably never stood a chance in hell of being taken seriously in the first place.
And, if you’re going to compile a list of “most egregious” lawsuits, then you really ought to be able to measure just how egregious they are—in terms of time and cost. But oddly, many of these lawsuits, as Lincoln points out, were dismissed or withdrawn. In fact, 80% of the lawsuits on the list were dismissed or withdrawn.
To be clear, many of the lawsuits were approaching the absurd. LawyersandSettlements.com certainly deemed a number of them so when we reported on them (see how we covered some of the lawsuits that made the list: 8 Questions for Quack who filed Chuck E. Cheese Gambling Lawsuit, Steven Miner, Kathryn Miner…Meet Lisa Steinberg, White Castle 290 lb Craver Files Lawsuit to Sit, Movie Madness: Lawsuit Says “Drive” didn’t Drive Enough).
But—and here’s the beef of the Public Citizen article—if you’re going to showcase lawsuits such as these and use them as the basis for your argument to handcuff the consumers’ right to seek justice, you need to come up with something better to base your argument on.
One-off lawsuits that are rapidly dismissed or withdrawn do not quite compare in impact with those of a larger scale that drag on for years (e.g., Bank of America lawsuits alone have probably cost this country more than any of us could fathom—and they continue because, for some reason, a slap on the wrist just doesn’t seem to deter recidivist fraudulent behavior.)
Indeed, as Lincoln then points out, the type of litigation that is clogging—or abusing—the courts and costing both businesses and “everyday Americans” is corporate fraud such as what we’ve seen with major banks and mortgage foreclosure practices.
And it’s time for the US Chamber of Commerce to take a look at that.
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