Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform.

If there is one book that every judge, politician, or pundit who has railed against the "lawsuit crisis" needs to read, it is this one.

American Bar Foundation Senior Research Fellow Stephen Daniels and Assistant Director Joanne Martin have labored for more than a decade to she some light on the work of civil juries. The authors' earlier work focused on punitive damages and concluded from empirical data that these damages are neither routinely awarded nor excessive.

Daniels and Martin expanded on their empirical findings in a landmark article that presented a scathing indictment of the "tort reformers"' campaign as "based on an unfounded, and perhaps manufactured, notion of crisis." (Stephen Daniels & Joanne Martin, Myth and Reality in Punitive Damages, 75 Minn. L. Rev. 1, 64 (1990).) Their new book builds on this earlier work, extending its scope to include products liability and medical negligence.

Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform opens with the proposition that "juries lie at the heart of the ongoing public policy debate over reform in the American civil justice system." "Reformers" point to jury verdicts as symbolic or representative of fundamental problems. But recording and reporting the outcomes of jury trials is one area where our civil justice system has performed incredibly poorly.

Each county courthouse keeps - or doesn't keep - its own records of cases filed and verdicts rendered. Few jurisdictions retain complete and reliable records going back 10 or 20 years. Nor is there a central authority responsible for collecting, assembling, and disseminating jury verdict information from all state court systems. As Daniels and Martin point out, this lack of detailed empirical a regarding civil jury verdicts provides a breeding ground for tort Myths, which the proponents of "tort reform" have exploited with considerable success.

The authors make two important contributions to our understanding of the civil justice system. The first is a body of detailed empirical information about the verdicts juries have rendered in products liability, medical negligence, and punitive damages cases. The core of Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform is a database of state court verdicts in these areas.

The authors have scoured the country for jury verdict records that are complete and sufficiently detailed and that cover enough time to provide reliable data. The resulting database contains verdict information from 81 jurisdictions throughout the country, including urban, small town, and rural areas, representing approximately one-third of the U.S. population.

The authors present their data, comparing localities, causes of action, severity of injuries, and other factors in unvarnished, sometimes tedious, detail. Daniels and Martin also examine local influences that are extraneous to the tort system.

For example, California verdict amounts reflect successive increases in the jurisdictional amount for small claims cases involving injuries from asbestos. Products liability trends m the port city of San Francisco are skewed by a massive influx of cases.

Indeed, the authors conclude that the complexity of verdict outcomes and the wide variations among courts "make any sweeping generalization about jury verdicts overall highly problematic."

With that, Daniels and Martin effectively cut the heart out of the "tort reform" argument. Their refutation is not merely that nationwide trends do not reveal a litigation "explosion." Rather, it is that the very notion of a nationwide trend in tort verdicts is itself sheer fiction.

Each verdict is the product of complex local factors. For that reason, the idea that broad "reforms" can effect sweeping changes in tort outcomes is likewise questionable.

The authors' second contribution is a thoughtful analysis of the "tort reformers"' success in placing the perception of a tort "crisis" at the forefront of the national agenda despite the lack of empirical support. Possessed of the resources to communicate directly to crucial elements of the general public, the authors find that the "tort reformers" make use of "horror stories," value-laden rhetoric, and misleading statistics.

As examples, the authors critically examine the works of Peter Huber and Walter Olson as well as the use of public relations campaigns and partisan think tanks. Of particular concern to Daniels and Martin is the "reformers" use of academic literature to serve political objectives. In the authors' view, research into the civil justice system paid for by participants in the "reform" debate threatens academic integrity, and the authors call for a system of peer review to ensure the reliability of published work.

Given the importance of the jury trial, not only to the civil justice system but also to the democratic process of self-governance, it is disheartening that the work of civil juries is so little understood and so widely attacked.

Daniels and Martin do not employ the breezy style and clever turns of phrase that help make Huber's books so accessible to the general reader. Nevertheless, Civil Juries and the Politics of Reform contains the most reliable empirical portrait we have of jury verdicts in products liability, medical negligence, and punitive damages cases.