Overlawyered reports on the potential for mass tort litigation against US (and, I suppose, foreign) corporations based on global warming claims. The post concludes:
All of which proves nothing at all about the actual causes or dangers of global warming. It’s just more evidence of a climate of greed and opportunism in the trial bar. And that’s one climate that never changes.
These sort of attacks on US business have a strongly negative impact on the US economy, especially the competitiveness of our capital markets. The bipartisam Schumer-Bloomberg report stated:
Survey respondents said that a fair and predictable legal environment was the second most important criterion determining a financial center’s competitiveness. In this regard, they felt that the United States was at a competitive disadvantage to the United Kingdom. They attribute this US disadvantage to a propensity toward litigation and concerns that the US legal environment is less fair and less predictable than the UK environment. Empirical evidence certainly suggests that litigation has become an important issue: 2005 set a new high for the number of securities class-action settlements in the US, and for the overall value of these settlements. Of course, many of these cases addressed the legitimate claims of investors and consumers in situations of notable corporate wrongdoing. However, in aggregate, some of the unique characteristics of the US legal environment are driving growing international concerns about participating in US financial markets – concerns heightened by recent cases of perceived extraterritorial application of US law.
