Personal Responsibility v. Corporate Liability: How Personal Injury Lawyers Screen Cases in an Era of Tort Reform

Who is ultimately responsible for the harms that befall us? Corporations who make dangerous products, or the consumers who use them? The answer to this question has a profound impact on how personal injury lawyers screen products liability cases. In this chapter, I analyze results from an experimental vignette study in which 83 lawyers were asked to evaluate a hypothetical products liability case. Half of the lawyers practice in states considered to be difficult jurisdictions for the practice of personal injury law due to tort reform and conservative political climates (Texas and Colorado), while the other half work in states that have been relatively unaffected by tort reform and are considered to be more ‘‘plaintiff friendly’’ (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). While lawyers in reform states and non-reform states were equally likely to accept the hypothetical case with which they were presented, they approached the case in different ways, used different theories, and made different Access to Justice Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 12, 203–230 Copyright r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1108/S1521-6136(2009)0000012012