When a jury sticks it to a huge corporation, it's always big news. A crushing verdict of $4.9 billion against General Motors Corp. in Los Angeles drew massive media coverage, as did a $5-billion award in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case and a $144.8-billion thrashing of the tobacco industry in a Florida class action.
Mega-verdicts such as these have helped fuel legislative campaigns to overhaul the legal system by limiting lawsuits and jury awards. Driving the crusade for what business groups call tort reform is the notion that frivolous suits and jackpot judgments are strangling the economy.
While acknowledging that excesses no doubt occur, many legal observers say there is no evidence that people are filing more lawsuits or that juries are getting more generous -- indeed, there is some data to the contrary. And mammoth verdicts, in the rare cases in which they occur, almost always are tossed out or sharply reduced later.
Feeding the perception of a crisis in the legal system, they say, is the way the news media cover the courts.
After the big headlines, critics say, the media often drop the ball, losing interest in what happens later. Published studies of news content and a Times examination of major recent cases show that when the immense verdicts were overturned or dramatically reduced, the news frequently was banished to the inside pages or simply not reported.
Legal experts and media observers say such coverage gives a distorted picture of the civil justice system while lending credence to fears of irrational jury awards. News coverage has reinforced the message "that the system's out of control, and that juries are using the tort system to redistribute wealth in some unjust and unprincipled way," said Robert MacCoun, a professor of law and public policy at UC Berkeley.
The popular view that there are more lawsuits and bigger damage awards than ever before is not supported by available evidence.
A 35-state survey by the National Center for State Courts found that the number of tort filings declined 4% from 1993 through 2002 despite population growth. And in the nation's 75 largest counties, the median award to victorious plaintiffs was $37,000 in 2001 -- much less than the inflation-adjusted median of $63,000 in 1992, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a branch of the U.S. Department of Justice.
