Tort reform functions partly as partisan class entrenchment, not policy neutrality

Evidence

Grover G. Norquist, Winner Takes All: The 2000 Elections Will Decide the Democrats’ Future, AM. SPECTATOR (Va.), Apr. 1999, at 66, 67. In addition to trial lawyers, Norquist named “labor unions” and “Big City machines” as the other two pillars of the Democratic Party. Id. at 66. Following the election of President Bush, the Republican leadership did indeed move to enact a series of tort reform measures. Again, neither Bush nor any administration officials spoke of the reforms as mechanisms of entrenchment. But others did: for example, Washington Post reporter Thomas B. Edsall wrote of the GOP’s tort reform efforts that “[t]he drive to limit court-awarded damages in civil lawsuits … is usually framed as a contest between accident victims’ rights and reasonable constraints on corporate behavior. Increasingly, however, the battle is deeply partisan, as conservative groups try to mobilize the political right and cripple a key Democratic constituency, trial lawyers.” — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete example of an ‘entrenching’ policy: changing who can sue alters a recurrent funding base of a rival constituency.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s question on ideology durability — this shows an entrenchment logic operating through law (damages caps) and material constituencies (trial lawyers) rather than pure rhetoric. — connects to: Substantive policy entrenchment outlasts and outperforms partisan entrenchment in durability. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 166; Framework statutes entrench policy through political costs rather than legal prohibitions. — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 192; Conservative incumbents treated restrictive labor law and poll taxes as interchangeable tools — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 218 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Seemingly substantive policy domains conceal underlying partisan self-entrenchment battles. #corroborates (0.95) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 536
• Partisan defunding incentives partly drove Republican adoption of tort reform #expands (0.92) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 263
• Labor law rules function as tools for partisan entrenchment #exemplifies (0.90) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 241
• Pro-enterprise tort rules reflected broad consensus rather than judicial conspiracy #contradicts (0.88) — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1799
• Substantive policy choices produce entrenchment just as formal rule changes do #expands (0.85) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 2
• Functional political entrenchment works without changing formal legal rules #expands (0.80) — Daryl Levinson and Benjamin I. Sachs, Political Entrenchment and Public Law, 173