• Jury Verdicts - Consistent and Conservative PDF
• Punitive Damages: Rare Resonable, and Effective PDF
• How Big Business Attacks Our Judges and Threatens the Independence of Our Judiciary
• Judges Show Extraordinary Support for the Civil Jury System
• The History of the Right to Trial by Jury in Civil Cases

Since the mid-1990s, a principal focus of the "tort reform" movement has been to ensure the election of pro-industry state judges and the defeat of judges who typically support plaintiffs' verdicts or have voted to strike down state tort law restrictions as unconstitutional. Their tactics have included running issue ads, distributing biased evaluations of judges' records (as has been done in at least Michigan, Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama), and bogus studies attempting to identify trial lawyer contributions to judges, which astute journalists have found deliberately inflate numbers by using overly broad definitions of "trial lawyers."

There is some evidence that major industries, which seek immunity from lawsuits, and their insurers, are often behind judicial attack ads. Sometimes this support is concealed by the use of "soft on crime" themes to defeat judges because of their decisions on "business" issues. The tobacco industry, in connection with its "tort reform" efforts, had long been focused on influencing judicial elections. The objectives of these industries are clear. Both taking power away from civil jurors with "tort reform" laws and targeting judges whose decisions they do not like, Big Business is trying to change the entire landscape of the civil justice system. The intensity of these efforts leaves no doubt that a weakened civil justice system is only their first goal. Control of the entire judicial process in civil cases is their plain objectives.

Civil juries have been called the conscience of the community. They stand as indispensable watchdogs over corporate negligence and corruption. Not surprisingly, corporations and their insurers have been at the forefront of attacks on civil juries over the years. These business interests seek to limit their liability exposure by proposing to take compensation judgments away from juries. They seek to limit the power and authority of the civil jury, and in some cases, to replace the civil jury system with a statutory structure over which their political action committee money can have more control. But unlike other, weaker democracies which have abolished the civil jury, our system, thus far, has largely withstood the assaults. The jury's roots are deeper here. The American colonists fought the Revolutionary War in significant part over England's repeated attempts to restrict jury trials. The U.S. Constitution was nearly defeated over its failure to guarantee the right to civil jury trial. (The Seventh Amendment eventually resolved the problem.) The right to jury trial has been secured not only by the U.S. Constitution, but by every state as well.

Despite its historic and current importance, today's civil jury remains one of the embattled features of the U.S. judicial system. Since the 1980s, we have seen a non-stop barrage of legislative attempts to significantly weaken the civil jury. The societal harm caused by such moves stretches far beyond the damage caused to parties in individual cases. It threatens democracy itself.

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