While it has not received the same attention in recent years that it used to garner, “tort reform” has traditionally been an idea that has been espoused by the political right.  The argument usually is that there is an excessive amount of frivolous litigation that is clogging up our legal system and hurting American businesses.  My goals in this post are threefold.  First, I will explain the basics of the tort system to give a background to readers who are not familiar with this topic.  Second, I will argue that tort reform as it is currently debated is not in the least a conservative idea.  Finally, I will explain why, if tort reform is not a conservative idea, so many conservatives nonetheless argue for it.

What are torts, and why/how would we reform them?

The most basic definition of a tort is a civil wrong.  However, this simple definition belies the breadth of just how many things are encompassed within the word “tort.”  Torts include things from simple battery to professional malpractice, from wrongful death to infliction of emotional distress.  For the most part, any wrong committed between two people that you cannot neatly fit into some other legal category like property or contract probably falls within tort, and sometimes actions that fall within other legal frameworks also have tort applications.  For example, if I were to murder someone, I probably would have charges brought against me by the state in a criminal proceeding, but I also could have a wrongful death action brought against me by the victim’s family – hence the famous distinction between the criminal and civil trials of O.J. Simpson.

I'm interning for a month in Aix-en-Provence, France with a French law firm.  As I have a few minutes of free time, I thought I'd throw out some of the perspective my time working at a French law firm has given me on the costs and benefits of the American and French legal systems.  A lot of what I write below might seem like obvious things to many readers, especially those who have studied history or law at all, but I just want to lay out all of the important facts so that even those readers with a very elementary knowledge of law can follow along.

Note: This is a long article, and I don't expect everyone to read it.  Therefore, these two paragraphs in italics sum up my point:

Common law countries traditionally have less regulation but more litigation, while civil law countries have the inverse setup.  With more litigation and less regulation, we only have the courts deciding disputes when actual wrongs have occurred, contrary to an over-regulated system where companies are punished by the government for things they have not even done yet.  

I think that the United States' traditional model of allowing a huge amount of litigation while having relatively small regulation has served us well, as it has allowed our economy to grow while punishing companies in court if and when they actually do something wrong.  However, now that we are maintaining our massive amount of litigation AND adding on a suffocating amount of regulation, we threaten to suffocate our economy and stifle any growth by businesses attempting to be honest who fear they will be punished at every term by both litigation and regulation.

Now, if you want to know the historical background and rationale for why I wrote the above paragraphs, keep on reading:

Newly published research indicates that US drone attacks are killing very few valuable targets in Pakistan.  Considering the amount of blowback against the United States caused by these very attacks, this data should seriously call into question whether these attacks should be continued.

The Washington Post reports:

CIA drone attacks in Pakistan killed at least 581 militants last year, according to independent estimates. The number of those militants noteworthy enough to appear on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists: two.

Despite a major escalation in the number of unmanned Predator strikes being carried out under the Obama administration, data from government and independent sources indicate that the number of high-ranking militants being killed as a result has either slipped or barely increased.

In the report, the argument is made that civilian casualties in such attacks are down to six percent.  However, based on my research, this claim by the CIA has absolutely no backing, and is based more on CIA guesswork than anything else.  We should remember the words of Baitullah Mehsud, founder of the Pakistani Taliban, who said, "I spent three months trying to recruit and only got 10-15 persons. One U.S. [drone] attack and I got 150 volunteers!" (cited article on p. 14)

Along with the cost in human lives of these drone attacks, we also must never forget their economic cost.  The amount of money it takes to build, fuel, and maintain an attack drone and its armaments certainly could be put to better use, ideally in the free market, but even in other areas of government as well.

“The people at Wikileaks could have blood on their hands,” Senator Lindsey Graham said Nov. 28 in response to the whistleblower organization’s most recent publications of previously classified State Department documents. “I don’t know what the cables may say, but we’re at war. The world is getting dangerous by the day. People who do this are low on the food chain as far as I’m concerned. If you can prosecute them, let’s try.”

I was amused, though not surprised, to see these words coming from a person who does have blood on his hands. However, Sen. Graham’s response to the most recent actions of Wikileaks sum up the United States government’s general demeanor towards whistle blowing in general – “How dare you reveal the things we have done.” Americans can learn a lot about our government simply from observing its response to an organization like Wikileaks. Let’s consider just three of the dozens of such lessons.

There is no anti-war political party in Washington

The entire point of Wikileaks’ revelations about American foreign policy has been to demonstrate that there is a massive divide between what the United States government claims to be doing around the world and what it actually does. And, despite the thousands upon thousands of documents that have revealed substantial war crimes, abuses of power, and despicable acts that establish a pattern going far beyond a few isolated incidents, not a single major politician in Washington has stated that the incidents being revealed need to be investigated. Instead, Wikileaks is attacked for daring to reveal what the United States government deemed that its people did not need to know.