James Sensenbrenner, September 23, 2004

President Bush recently said, "We must protect small business owners and workers from the explosion of frivolous lawsuits that threaten jobs across America." Every year, jobs are lost, prices are raised, and small businesses go out of business because of the cost of frivolous lawsuits. It’s hard for our nation’s society, including within the state of Wisconsin, to rest easy in a legal culture of fear: churches are discouraging counseling by ministers, children have learned to threaten teachers with lawsuits, and youth sports are shutting down in the face of lawsuits for injuries or even hurt feelings. Even if a lawsuit with little merit is dismissed, it still causes damage because the person who is sued is responsible for paying his or her own legal bills.

This is not a new phenomenon. Frivolous and outrageous lawsuits have filled our courts’ dockets for years, and although the House of Representatives has repeatedly acted to address this issue, Democrats in the Senate have successfully prevented our legislation from being brought up onto the Senate floor. For example, in June 2003, the House passed the Class Action Fairness Act, a comprehensive, common-sense bill that promotes a more efficient national litigation system, and provides fairness to all potential plaintiffs. The Senate still has not acted on it. Moreover, earlier this year, the House passed the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act, which is designed to foreclose frivolous obesity related lawsuits against the food industry. That too is wasting away in the Senate.

On September 14, in yet another effort to address the problems of our litigious society, the House passed HR 4571, the Lawsuit Abuse Reduction Act (LARA), which cracks down on frivolous lawsuits by implementing sanctions against personal injury lawyers who file meritless claims. The bill penalizes individuals and their lawyers for bringing a frivolous lawsuit to court. It prevents ‘forum-shopping,’ a practice in which lawyers try to file certain cases in states that are more likely to be sympathetic to their lawsuit. LARA requires that personal injury cases be brought only where the plaintiff resides, where the plaintiff was allegedly injured, or where the defendant’s principal place of business is located. The legislation also includes a "3 strikes and you’re out" provision, which mandates a 1-year suspension of a lawyer’s license to practice in any federal court after he or she files 3 or more frivolous lawsuits in the same federal court.

HR 4571 is an important piece of legislation because current rules against frivolous lawsuits are ineffective. The right to sue has not only been exploited by lawyers, it’s been turned into one of the most destructive business models in the American economy. Personal injury lawyers today can gamble on taking cases on a contingency fee basis because they need only win 1 in 10 to score the big judgment that will make up for the losses in other cases. And we all live with the consequences, which include higher taxes and insurance rates, lack of discipline in our schools, and doctors going out of business, thus limiting Americans’ access to health care.

Even Good Samaritans are told to hit the road. When one man routinely cleared a trail after snowstorms, the county had to ask him to stop. The supervisor of district operations wrote, "If a person falls, you are more liable than if you had never plowed at all. Crazy world. Unfortunately, the times we are in allow for a much more litigious environment than common sense would dictate."

Scenarios such as these, and the countless others that raise the ire of individuals with common sense, are what motivated my colleagues and I to pass HR 4571. As a result, once again, the ball is in the Senate’s court, bringing us back to the question: will the Senate pass it, or drop it?

Congressman James Sensenbrenner, a Republican, represents the Fifth Congressional District of Wisconsin. He serves as chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary. The Fifth District of Wisconsin forms an arc surrounding Milwaukee to the North and West, and includes parts of Jefferson, Milwaukee and Waukesha counties, and all of Ozaukee and Washington counties.