Courts have inherent powers to control bad-faith conduct, and the US Supreme Court has on this basis upheld sanctions even for acts outside the courtroom. In addition, judges are often granted statutory powers. The best-known sanction in the United States is Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, as amended in 1983. They tend to use the sanctions for compensation to the aggrieved party, and only after a motion by that party. It is frequently observed that a good rule can be bad policy when applied by uncooperative judges.
Judges often condone, or even praise, aggressive litigation.
If legislatures and judges are unwilling to stop nuisance suits, the public might be able to rely on the plaintiff's bar, resorting to judo tort reform which uses the opponent's strength and momentum against him. A nuisance suit is an injury, often intentional, and reckless by definition. Judges have been uniformly hostile to suits brought on general tort grounds of negligent harm, but this is perhaps because of the existence of special causes of action for malicious prosecution, both criminal and civil. Perhaps the biggest blanks are in the areas of public choice theory and theory-driven empirical study. Reforming a system against the inclinations of those who staff it is no easy problem, but scholarship has concentrated on the effect of successful proposals rather than implementation.