A few statistics illustrate the costs to consumers of today's tort system. All the men and women who work for those firms are also consumers in one way or another. Thus, even those who never bring liability lawsuits are victims of the broken legal system when they lose jobs or cannot find work, or when the products they wish to buy become more expensive or even unavailable. The legal system hurts tort victims more directly. That is hardly an outcome of which advocates of consumer protection can be proud.
American competitiveness is hurt as well.
Clearly, we need to encourage people to stop bringing frivolous lawsuits, to find less costly ways to resolve disputes, and to remove the unnecessary burden of the tort system from American workers, consumers, and business firms. There is no doubt that tort law has changed dramatically in the past thirty to forty years. That change resulted primarily from the rise of the idea that tort law can serve as a positive engine of social policy. In the 1950s and 1960s, academics recommended those goals, and courts adopted them in the years that followed. Since that time, scholars have come to acknowledge that there are limits to the extent to which tort law can create incentives to reduce the number of accidents.