Pros And Cons Of Tort Reform

Yi Ding

BUSN201-86N

Ms. Richards

19 June 2016

Tort reform

Nowadays, tort reform is a controversial problem in the United States. By comparing the pros and cons of tort reform from different aspects, I think that tort reform is necessary.

The textbook, “Business law today” (2014), clarifies that tort is a wrongful act that results in harm or injury to another and leads to civil liability. Tort law is designed to compensate those who have suffered a loss or injury due to another person 's wrongful act.

Many people are in favor of tort law because the purpose of the tort law is to “provide remedies for the invasion of various protected interests (Miller & Jentz, 2014)”. In other words, the victim will get compensated in accidents, and they believe

If the plaintiff and the defendant can solve the problem by themselves, the defendant only need to pay the loss of plaintiff. However, if the plaintiff does not agree to solve the problem privately, both plaintiff and defendant will go into a complicated process. Both side will need to pay for the court costs, bar fees, and so on. To win the case, it is necessary for both plaintiff and defendant to hire conscientious and expensive lawyers. After the case closed, the defendant will need to pay all the cost if the plaintiff wins the case, including victim’s lost, the court costs, and bar fees. Nowadays, many victims choose to file a suit on some insignificant cases because they think that they can win the case and gain money from it. However, each lawsuit requires not only money to hire a conscientious lawyer, but also time and efforts. To me, with efforts and high expenses, the money that the plaintiff wins afterwards does not worth

Then, the court can deal with more important issues, and the efficiency of the court will be improved greatly. Thus, I think that time saving should be considered as an advantage of the tort reform.

Tort reform has influence not only on the court and victims, but also on clinicians and medical field. Many health providers and clinicians are in favor of the tort reform (Santiago, 2016). The tort reform make clinicians have no full responsibilities to compensate for the malpractice, and they will not need pay for the cost. However, this is not mean that it is unfair to patients. For big medical treatments, such as surgeries, patients’ families usually need to sign a contract for possible medical risks that might happen. This is also a protection to doctors.

With tort reform, the society become a physician-friendly practice environment. The research has found that “physicians who work in tort-reform states pay tens of thousands of dollars less in annual malpractice premiums than physicians in other states” (Santiago,