The Pros And Cons Of Tort Reform

I am going to write this paper on tort reform, what it is and its overarching role in the documentary. Tort Reform is defined as “proposed changes in the civil justice system that aim to reduce the ability of victims to bring litigation or to reduce damages they can receive”. Another theme that I believe ties in really well with the idea of tort reform is the idea of how big of an influence money has in politics. Many people would agree that there are a lot of companies that would want tort reform so they don’t have to worry about losing millions of dollars.
I don’t believe that it is a good thing for the United States and the world in general and it isn’t a good way to accomplish the idea of big corporations wanting to restrict consumers from using the civil justice system. I personally believe and am siding with the conflict theorist on this film. I don’t feel that it’s right to try and reduce the ability of the normal American citizen to sue a company when the company is in the wrong doing. I feel that a conflict theorist would not agree with this idea and that the American citizen has a right to sue for a wrong doing if they chose so. I feel as though they believe that this would be infringing on the rights of the Americans and their ability to do what they want and how this is essentially restricting their constitutional rights. Now

that I have explained my siding with a theorist I will explain more about how it fits in with the film.
I do agree that there are people trying to get money and they don’t have a true case to bring to court. I do feel that there are ways to regulate that by taking close looks at the cases before bringing them to court. It was sad to see that all of those people just thought Stella Liebeck was just trying to get money by suing the McDonalds until they saw the damage that the coffee had brought to her and then they realized that she actually did have a case and all of these lawyers and politicians are just interested in protecting the interest of the big companies because those companies are in the politicians pockets and pay for a lot of their funding needs like in the case of the Halliburton case at the end.
This theme ties into well with another theme throughout the film which is the overarching theme of influence of money in politics. This theme is really prevalent in the case Judge Oliver Diaz. He was running against another opponent who was for tort reform. There were many companies that backed this man and paid over one million dollars to post ads that were negative towards Mr. Diaz because he was against tort reform. I think that it’s crazy how because big companies want tort reform they will pay that much money just to have a judge voted in to make sure that people trying to bring cases into the supreme court will get shut down. They were so worried about the one issue of tort reform that they didn’t even think about the life of Mr. Diaz and how they were ruining his life by slandering his name and saying all of these negative things about him.
Now that they lost the election and Oliver was voted back into the bench they decided to try ruin his life even more by charging him with taking bribery. If that doesn’t show how much power money has in politics I don’t know what will. Because these companies have so much money and they don’t possibly want to lose any of it they would rather ruin a man’s life and make sure that he never has a shot and being a judge again instead of potentially make sure a person that the company wronged can’t sue just because they don’t want to lose money. After they tried to charge him with bribery and that failed they decided it wasn’t enough so then they charged him with tax evasion and that also failed. These large companies would rather pay however much money to try ruin this man’s life instead of running the chance of wrongly doing someone and making sure that they wouldn’t get sued because that would make their company look bad on their name and they wouldn’t want that.
I am also siding with a conflict theorist on this topic too. They would not want a company to try and restrict the person’s right by using their money to make sure that there is more tort reform. I also believe that a conflict theorist would believe that the company could have made better use of their money and found better things to spend it on other than them trying to do things like basically attempting to ruin Mr. Diaz’s life and get the other judge elected just because they liked what he was for more than the other candidates.
Another part of the film that had a really overarching reach of money in politics is the family in Nebraska. The health care system was obviously in the wrong and the family should have been paid enough money to be able to have someone take care of their son full time for the rest of their lives. Instead there was a cap on the amount of money that could be paid out. This also has to do with the idea that money influences politics in the sense that because these companies don’t want to lose a lot of money even though they have plenty of money of it to these people that actually have a true problem and the money would help them out tremendously. I am also taking the view of a conflict theorist on this part of the film.
So in conclusion I wrote on two large overarching themes throughout the whole of the film.

I wrote about tort reform and how I feel it is a bad idea and I don’t agree with it. I also tied into that theme the theme of money in politics and without all the money in politics I feel as there would be a lot less people that would want tort reform because a lot less people would have a lot less money to lose. As for have a theory, I felt I viewed this whole film as a conflict theorist. I felt that because I thought most of the things happening in the film were wrong and restricting the rights of people and their constitutional

rights.