March 10, 2006
YOU MEAN ELECTIONS MATTER?:
'Silent Tort Reform' Is Overriding States' Powers (STEPHEN LABATON, 3/10/06, NY Times)
SUPPORTERS and detractors call it the "silent tort reform" movement, and it has quietly and quickly been gaining ground.Across Washington, federal agencies that supervise everything from auto safety to medicine labeling have waged a powerful counterattack against active state prosecutors and trial lawyers. In the last three decades, the state courts and legislatures have been vital avenues for critics of Washington deregulation. Federal policy makers, having caught onto the game, are now striking back.
Using a variety of largely unheralded regulations, officials appointed by President Bush have moved in recent months to neuter the states. At the urging of industry groups, the federal agencies have inserted clauses in new rules that block trial lawyers and state attorneys general from applying both higher standards in state laws and those in state court precedents.
The efforts by the federal regulators may wind up doing more than Congress to change state tort laws.
You actually meet people who think it doesn't matter which party controls executive offices.... Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2006 4:34 PM
Apparently, many of them are in the State Department. This is good news in all phases of government.
Posted by: jdkelly at March 10, 2006 6:25 PMAs usual, Freedom's advance guard has shown the way.
For years, the gun-grabbers had grasped at a judicial gun-ban by application of product liability tort law to guns intentionally used in crime.
We put paid to this nonsense.
http://www.nra.org/Article.aspx?id=4228
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act smashed the career of the campaign to make lawful users of guns responsible for the acts of criminals.
This victory is a good example of pragmatic conservatism. The gun-rights movement valued the conservative result of preserving the RKBA over the ideology of federalism.
Posted by: Lou Gots at March 11, 2006 3:46 AM