WASHINGTON — The Bush administration's drive this year to limit lawsuits will get off to a fast start next week, not in Congress but in the Supreme Court.
In a pair of cases, government lawyers will argue that pesticide makers should be shielded from being sued by farmers and that once-high-flying companies should be protected from lawsuits by angry investors who say a stock was inflated.
The cases involving Texas peanut farmers and a San Diego drug company illustrate that the fight against what President Bush calls "lawsuit abuse" is not confined to Congress.
The administration's lawyers have repeatedly gone to the Supreme Court in hopes of erecting barriers to lawsuits. They have done so by siding with business officials and arguing that federal law should be read to block plaintiffs from taking their claims before juries.
They have had some big wins. Last year, the high court agreed with the administration's argument and shielded most managed-care networks from being sued for damages by their patients.
Now the administration is siding with two companies, and against farmers and shareholders, in a pair of unrelated cases that also turn on whether lawsuits should be permitted.
In the first case, the administration is siding with Dow Chemical Co. in seeking to block a lawsuit by 29 peanut farmers from west Texas who say one of Dow's weed killers destroyed their peanut plants.
In the second, the administration joined in defense of a small San Diego pharmaceutical company whose stock price plunged in 1998 after it revealed that its earlier predictions of strong sales growth were wrong. This seemingly small case could answer a billion-dollar question: Can investors and pension funds sue to recover their losses after the bursting of the dot-com bubble and the collapse of Enron and WorldCom?
The pesticide case began five years ago when a group of peanut farmers agreed to try a new weed killer made by Dow AgroSciences.
Ronnie Love, 63 and a lifelong peanut farmer, said he put the weed killer, Strongarm, on 150 acres when he seeded the field.
"They came up and just withered. They plain withered away," he said of the crops. Despite a summer of heavy watering, Love said his fields were nearly dead by fall.
He and the other farmers say Dow reneged on a promise to compensate them for millions of dollars in crop losses, and they notified the company they planned to sue for damages under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. This measure allows consumers who are bilked or sold a defective product to sue for damages.
