Editor,
I read Whitney J. Davis' column about lawsuits Monday with dismay. Her opinion contains several errors that warrant some
clarification.
First, class action and product liability doctrines are not the same thing, and they are designed to have different social outcomes. It is clear that when rules concerning liability change, wealth shifts and actors change their behavior.
Second, social risk and social costs are inherent in commercial and productive enterprise. As a matter of social policy, the question is often who bears the risk and who suffers the costs. When
manufacturers are not held responsible for their behavior, the cost is borne by accident victims. A client of mine who lost his hand in a defective punch press machine should not absorb a loss so that the manufacturer remains profitable.
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Third, insurance helps to socialize the cost of lawsuits by spreading those costs among all the manufacturers and all like items manufactured.
Fourth, in a highly interdependent economy, victims are not limited to retail consumers. Damage in recent years has increasingly been inflicted on pension funds, employers and banks. I have been an expert and have litigated some of those cases.
Last, big tobacco is probably the worst example one could cite in an article that refers to accountability. It is now well-established that big tobacco lied about the dangers of its product and concealed studies of its danger, then distributed the product knowing of its dangers. It actively lobbied to limit effective warnings then cited ineffective and misleading warnings as a defense against claims made by uninformed consumers. Certainly, the plaintiff's lawyers - who invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and millions in the value of their fees - did not believe the claims to be doubtful. If the shareholders of such companies are not held responsible for this conduct, who should be?
Robert Poyourow
UNM faculty
