The Mission of the Manhattan Institute is
to develop and disseminate new ideas that
foster greater economic choice and
individual responsibility.

James R. Copland
James R. Copland is the Director of the Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy. Copland writes on the litigation industry, medical malpractice law, and securities litigation.
• Litigation Reform
• Medical Malpractice
• Securities Litigation
Walter K. Olson
Walter K. Olson is a Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy Senior Fellow. Olson's research focuses on regulation through litigation, loser pays reforms, and employment law.
• Litigation Reform
• Regulation through Litigation
• Employment Law
Walter Olson's OVERLAWYERED.COM.
Peter W. Huber
Peter W. Huber is a Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy Senior Fellow. Huber is an expert on scientific evidence in the courts, litigation's effect on innovation, telecommunications law, energy, and the environment.
• Litigation Reform
• Science in the Courts
• Energy Policy
• Environmental Policy
• Telecommunications and Information Technology
Marie Gryphon
Marie Gryphon is a Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy Senior Fellow. Gryphon is an expert on loser pays litigation reforms and law and economics.
• Litigation Reform
• Loser Pays
• Law and Economics
CLP Employment/Research Opportunity: Empirical Fellow in Law and Economics
For more information on the Center for Legal Policy
please contact Jim Copland
(212) 599-7000
fax (212) 599-3494
For media inquires, please contact Lindsay Young Craig
(212) 599-7000
fax (212) 599-3494
Center for Legal Policy.

About the Center for Legal Policy

For over twenty years, the Manhattan Institute has argued that America's litigation system reduces innovation and investment, lowers safety and well-being, and erodes the risk-taking and personal responsibility essential to our free society. The Institute's Center for Legal Policy aims to communicate thoughtful ideas on civil justice reform to real decision-makers. The Center's work has been widely cited by hundreds of news reports, with The Washington Post going so far as to call Senior Fellows Peter Huber and Walter Olson the "intellectual gurus of tort reform."

The Center for Legal Policy's fellows have written multiple books, and they have published numerous articles in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. The Center's fellows also make frequent radio, television, and public appearances and have testified before both houses of Congress. The Center for Legal Policy publishes reports and conference transcripts, and the Center and its fellows manage three websites valuable to legal reform:

  • PointofLaw.com, a web magazine that brings together information and opinion on the U.S. litigation system, with daily postings by and regular discussions among top legal scholars;
  • TrialLawyersInc.com, a series of reports and updates that shed light on the size, scope, and inner workings of America's lawsuit industry; and
  • Walter Olson's OverLawyered.com, a weblog with daily updates and incisive commentary on the effects of "overlawyering" on American business and society.

The Center for Legal Policy hosts regular forums and conferences in New York City and around the country. If you are interested in attending a future forum, please email your contact information to Jim Copland.

Important Legal Reform Books by CLP Scholars

The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America's Rule of Law
by Walter K. Olson
Truman Talley Books/St. Martin's, January 2003

A gripping exploration of the growing power of massive class-action lawsuits. Olson shows how trial lawyers are rapidly becoming an unelected, unchecked, and unbalanced fourth branch of government.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE
The Excuse Factory: How Employment Law Is Paralyzing the American Workplace
by Walter K. Olson
The Free Press, June 1997

Walter Olson documents how a web of regulations, laws, and court decisions has fouled and restricted employers' and employees' relationships and freedoms.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE
Judging Science: Scientific Knowledge and the Federal Courts
by Peter W. Huber, Kenneth R. Foster
MIT Press, May 1997

A probing account of the nature of science and its use and abuse in the judicial system.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE
Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom
by Peter W. Huber
Perseus Book Group, August 1991

A seminal work on the emerging class of lawyers and expert witnesses who push forward unsubstantiated legal claims on the basis of "junk science." In Galileo's Revenge, Huber offers a scathing indictment of how legal professionals have shifted the law away from serious science.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE
The Litigation Explosion: What Happened When America Unleashed the Lawsuit
by Walter K. Olson
Penguin Books, 1991

Called the best book ever written on the subject of lawsuits in the United States. Both serious and entertaining, Olson's Litigation Explosion documents how America has become the most litigious society in the world.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE
Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences
by Peter W. Huber
Basic Books, 1988

One of the first works to explain the recent transformation of American liability law and the litigation explosion it unleashed. In this book, Huber shows how the dramatic increase in liability lawsuits has undermined the very principles that brought it about in the first place — safety and freedom.
AVAILABLE AT AMAZON | READ MORE

Even before launching its full legal reform effort, the Manhattan Institute sponsored Roberta Karmel's Regulation by Prosection (Simon & Schuster, 1982), which focused on the overcriminalization of corporate conduct—aa topic certainly relevant today. More recently, the Manhattan Institute supported David Schoenbrod and Ross Sandler's Democracy by Decree (Yale University Press, 2003), which examines how judicial consent decrees have been transferring power from elected, accountable officials to lawyers.

The Litigation Industry

The Center for Legal Policy is committed to chronicling how trial attorneys in the United States collectively behave just like the biggest of businesses: generating cash from traditional profit centers (like asbestos), exploring potential growth markets (like suits against lead paint manufacturers), and developing new products (like suits against the fast-food industry). Plaintiffs' lawyers aggressively pursue clients through advertisements on television and radio, in newspapers and on the internet. Through tort litigation, the plaintiffs' bar in America, which the CLP has dubbed Trial Lawyers, Inc., grosses almost $50 billion per year—significantly more than the annual revenues Microsoft or Intel, and more than twice the global sales of Coca-Cola. The litigation industry in turn spends its earnings to block legal reform through one of the most powerful public relations and government relations lobbies in America. Since 1990, trial lawyers have donated over a half-billion dollars to federal political campaigns alone—a figure far higher than any other industry group.

Reports:

Articles:

Events:

to archive >>

Regulation through Litigation

As every beginning student of government is aware, America's constitution and those of each of the fifty states divide governmental authority among three coequal branches: the legislative, which makes laws; the executive, which enforces laws; and the judiciary, which interprets laws. That the elected branches of government are responsible for enacting policy makes sense, because elected representatives can easily be replaced by a dissatisfied populace. As judges have loosened their strictures on the scope of litigation, however, they have increasingly enabled attorneys to dictate policy. Legislators themselves are not blameless in this phenomenon, as they have often ceded power willingly to "private attorneys general" to enforce laws, rather than making difficult policy decisions for which they could be held accountable. In many instances, too, state attorneys general or local officials have worked with allied plaintiffs' lawyers to pursue suits or prosecutions that effectively dictate national policy, an inversion of America's federal scheme. Whether or not one agrees with the political objectives being pursued through litigation, one has to be fearful of the democratic implications of what Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson calls "The Rule of Lawyers," and the Center for Legal Policy is devoted to documenting and analyzing this phenomenon.

Reports:

Testimony:

Articles:

Events:

  • CLP Conference The Growing Use and Abuse of State Consumer Protection Laws, 7-13-06, New York City
  • CLP Forum Restoring Democracy: The Federal Consent Decree Fairness Act, 4-3-06 (video), New York City
  • Manhattan Institute Forum Speakers: Philip K. Howard, Founder & Chairman, Common Good; and Richard Arum, New York University, 1-8-04, New York City
  • CLP Forum Speaker: Hon. Robert H. Bork, Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, 12-11-03, New York City
  • CLP Conference The Growing Hazard of Mold Litigation, 7-17-03, Washington, D.C.
  • CLP Judges Symposia Lecture Series Speaker: Walter K. Olson, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute Comment: Hon. Ralph K. Winter, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 4-12-03, New York City
  • Manhattan Institute Forum Speaker: Walter K. Olson, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute & Author, The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Litigation Elite Threatens America's Rule of Law, 1-14-03, New York City
  • CLP Conference Democracy By Decree: What Happens When Courts Run Government, 1-13-03, Washington, D.C.
  • CLP Forum Mass Litigation in Jefferson County, Mississippi, 12-3-02, New York City
  • CLP Forum The Legal, Economic, and Political Legacy of Governments' Tobacco Litigation, 6-5-01, New York City
to archive >>

Class Actions

Class actions are designed to allow legal redress for a group of individuals, each of whom has been similarly harmed. The principle underlying class actions is that many harms are large but broadly dispersed, such that each person harmed may not have sufficient injury to file a claim, given the legal process's high administrative costs. The class action device has inherent problems, however. To begin with, it is often not the case that claimants are, in actuality, "similarly situated." Various factual differences that might lead to disparate outcomes in individually litigated claims are regularly glossed over when such claims are joined into a class. Even when class members' injuries are alike, there is a significant agency problem in class action litigation; since, by definition, individual claims are small for class litigation, no individual plaintiff typically has sufficient interest to monitor or control the class attorneys. As such, and given the enormous sums available when attorneys aggregate thousands or millions of claims, the class action device has become a favored form of legal attack: class action filings increased 300 percent in federal courts and 1,000 percent in state courts during the 1990s. The Center for Legal Policy has been a leader in analyzing class action abuses and developing solutions; our empirical work helped form the basis for Congress's landmark 2005 Class Action Fairness Act.

Reports:

Testimony:

Articles:

Events:

  • CLP Judges Symposia Lecture Series Giving Class Actions a Hard Second Look, 3-11-04, San Francisco
  • CLP Forum Magnet Courts: If You Build Them, Claims Will Come, 4-11-03, New York City
  • CLP Conference Understanding Asbestos Litigation: The Genesis, Scope, and Impact 1-23-03, New York City
  • CLP Forum Mass Litigation in Jefferson County, Mississippi, 12-3-02, New York City
  • CLP Forum Class Actions, Competition, and Reflections on Federalism, 11-18-02, New York City
  • CLP Conference The New Class Action Targets: Are Class Actions Undermining Regulation in the Fields of Financial Services, High Technology, and Telecommunications?, 10-30-02, New York City
  • CLP Judges Symposia Lecture Series Class Actions: The Need for a Hard Second Look, 11-16-02, New York City
  • CLP Judges Symposia Lecture Series Class Actions: The Need for a Hard Second Look, 6-26-02, Dearborn, Michigan
  • CLP Conference Class Actions/Aggregations in Magnet Courts; The Empirical Evidence, 6-17-02, Washington D.C.
  • CLP Forum The Impact of Litigation on Shareholder Value, 11-27-01, New York City
  • CLP Judges Symposia Lecture Series Uses and Abuses of Class Actions, 10-30-01, Chicago, Illinois
  • CLP Conference Excessive Legal Fees: Protecting Unsophisticated Consumers, Class Action Members, and Taxpayers, 4-25-00, Washington, D.C.
to archive >>

Employment Law

Getting hired, promoted, and fired used to be relatively simple concepts: workers who showed signs of promise got hired or promoted; those who failed to impress or execute were passed by or replaced. That was before employment litigation. In today's environment, getting fired becomes "wrongful termination," and a candid project evaluation becomes "workplace defamation." Employers are expected to police their workers' discourse—or face a lawsuit over a "hostile work environment." Moreover, a lawsuit by one disgruntled employee can change the workings of an entire industry: hiring, firing, wage-setting, and almost every other decision traditionally left to the free market. The capriciousness of the employment litigation landscape gives employers little clear guidance: some employers have reacted to fears of lawsuits by documenting personnel decisions obsessively, while others instead put as little on paper as they can get away with. What is clear is that employment law—what Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson calls "The Excuse Factory"—is stifling economic opportunities, often for the classes of individuals the law is designed to protect. Olson and the Center for Legal Policy will continue to show the shortfalls of this area of the American legal landscape.

Reports:

Articles:

to archive >>

Medicine and the Law

America's medical system today has more capability to save and improve lives than at any prior point in human history. But far too many individuals find health care insurance unaffordable, valuable drugs and medical devices that exist overseas are unavailable in the United States, many essential vaccines are in short supply, and doctors in certain vital specialties are scarce in many parts of the country. The Center for Legal Policy strongly believes that the out-of-control litigation system in the United States plays a major part in the problems underlying American health care. And as Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Peter Huber argued almost two decades ago in his seminal book Liability, many of the most pernicious effects lawsuits have on our health and safety are largely unobservable: the potential cure or product that would prolong or enhance life but never gets out of the research lab due to the fear of being sued. Despite scientists' best efforts, the side-effect-free drug has yet to be discovered, and there is still no such thing as a risk-free surgery. The Center for Legal Policy will continue to examine how litigation—from mass tort suits over pharmaceuticals to medical malpractice suits against physicians—adversely affect Americans' health.

Reports:

Articles:

Events:

to archive >>

Products Liability

In the twentieth century, as far more goods entered the market with more complex means of production and distribution, American law gradually changed to permit suits against companies that made defective products if the product failed to meet the manufacturer's design standards. Although the initial opening of products liability made sense, in the late 1960s courts began allowing juries to second-guess the manufacturers' designs themselves and to hold manufacturers liable for alternative designs that might have been safer. Eventually and inevitably, products liability law evolved such that jurors now regularly determine that manufacturers could have developed a safer product, even when such alternatives were rejected in complicated, protracted regulatory processes by federal agencies. After the Supreme Court determined in 1977 that lawyers have a constitutional right to advertise—and after attorneys made millions and ultimately billions of dollars suing thousands of companies over the harmful effects of asbestos—the floodgates were fully open. Today, plaintiffs regularly win in court even when they cannot show that they were injured at all, that their injury was caused by the product, or that the product's manufacturer was in any way negligent in making the product. The Center for Legal Policy has long studied the problems with modern American products liability law and continues to advance thoughtful reforms.

Reports:

Testimony:

Articles:

Events:

to archive >>

Science in the Courts

Evidence is what lawsuits are all about: evidence of injury, evidence of causation, and evidence of negligence. Unfortunately, in the American legal system, unreliable scientific evidence or mere conjecture, most commonly called "junk science," is often viewed credibly by lay jurors who are unable to distinguish fact from fiction. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Peter Huber has long fought to to purge junk science from the courtroom by having judges screen evidence to be introduced before juries, using the test he advocated in his pathbreaking book Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom: "the science of publication, replication, and verification, . . . consensus and peer review." Huber's intellectual influence on this issue reached the United States Supreme Court, which in its decision Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and decisions that followed, required federal judges to be gatekeepers and sort reliable from unreliable scientific evidence and to reject the latter. Daubert screening has substantially reduced the filing of frivolous lawsuits filed in federal court, but at the state court level, evidentiary standards vary, so the Center for Legal Policy remains committed to examining the impact of bad science on legal outcomes.

Reports:

Events:

  • CLP Conference The Growing Hazard of Mold Litigation, 7-17-03, Washington, D.C.
to archive >>

Judicial Selection

Fair, honest judges are required to enforce the law. Although self-interested factions will naturally try to attempt to influence legislators—hopefully neutralizing each other, as Madison suggests in The Federalist Papers—when judges become susceptible to outside influence, the rule of law is in serious jeopardy. Judges need to be neutral, impartial arbiters of the law insulated from political winds and outside pressures. Unfortunately, most tort cases are tried in state courts before elected judges. Anyone whose job rests in the hands of local special interests will naturally cater to those interests, and empirical research has shown that historically states with partisan judicial election systems tend to have higher tort awards in cases in which in-state plaintiffs sue out-of-state defendants. Because trial attorneys have the most focused, cognizable interest in the outcome of judicial races, they have historically given the majority of campaign contributions in these elections. More recently, national business interests have pooled their resources and won several hotly contested races, some with campaign expenditures in the millions of dollars. The Center for Legal Policy continues to research and write on the problems of judicial election and selection.

Reports:

Articles:

Events:

  • CLP Forum Speaker: Hon. Robert H. Bork, 12-11-03, New York City
  • CLP Conference State Judicial Elections: Past, Present, and Future, 4-18-01, Washington, D.C.
  • CLP Forum Reflections of a Survivor of State Judicial Election Warfare, 2-28-01, New York City
to archive >>

Reform Proposals

The Center for Legal Policy's mission is to do more than just point out shortcomings in American law: the Center aims to solve those problems by putting forth real, effective proposals for reform. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Walter Olson has been a long-time advocate of moving the United States toward a "loser pays" system in which the losing side in litigation pays the winners' legal costs. Olson developed his argument carefully in his first book, The Litigation Explosion. Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Peter Huber has devoted much of his writing to refining how judges accept or reject scientific evidence in the courts. Beginning more than a decade ago, the Manhattan Institute has developed and advocated comprehensive proposals for reforming contingency fees, the mechanism by which plaintiffs' lawyers are paid and thus the economic incentive underlying litigation. More recently, the Center for Legal Policy was at the forefront of advocating reforms of America's class action system. These are but a handful of the many reform ideas the Center for Legal Policy has analyzed and suggested, and the Center will continue to look for positive solutions to America's litigation crisis.

Reports:

Testimony:

Articles:

Events:

  • CLP Forum Tort Reform and Accidental Deaths, 11-16-05, New York City
  • CLP Forum Asbestos Litigation: Procedural Innovations and Forum Shopping, 9-14-05, New York City
  • CLP Conference 9/11 Victims' Compensation Fund: Successes, Failures, and Lessons for Tort Reform, 1-13-05, Washington, D.C.
  • CLP Conference A Crisis in Medical Malpractice: Evidence and Policy Solutions, 4-10-04, New York City
  • CLP Forum How Texas Tackled Tort Reform: Taking on Trial Lawyers, Inc., 10-8-03, New York City
  • New York Civic Forum Municipal Tort Reform, 6-20-02, New York City
  • CLP Forum Finding Effective Solutions to Lead Paint Hazards, 6-19-02, Providence, Rhode Island
  • CLP Forum Rethinking Legal Reform: A Global Perspective, 3-19-02, New York City
  • CLP Forum The New American Rule: A First Amendment to the Client's Bill of Rights, 4-27-00, New York City
to archive >>
PointOfLaw.com

New PoL Column:
Judges take harder line against lawyer misconduct
By By Glenn G. Lammi As Federal District Court Judge Loretta A. Preska wrote last summer in Kensington Int'l Ltd. v. Republic of Congo, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63115, *1 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 23, 2007), "Civil litigation is not always civil." The...


* * *

New Featured Discussion:
SMOKE AND MIRRORS?
David Wagner and Michael Krauss discuss the Supreme Court's decision in Philip Morris v. Williams.
March 2007

Trial Lawyers, Inc.

New Report!
Trial Lawyers Inc: Asbestos
Trial Lawyers Inc Asbestos
The Center for Legal Policy is proud to release the newest edition of Trial Lawyers Inc. series. Asbestos, once thought to be a "magic mineral," ended up causing thousands of deaths of those exposed to the substance. Likewise, litigation that originally sought redress for the truly injured, has metastasized into a big business that recruits sham victims to beef up the plaintiffs' bar's bottom line.

Click here to read this new report!

The Litigation Industry
Reports | Articles | Events
The CLP is committed to chronicling how trial attorneys in the United States operate as a business and work aggressively to block legal reform.
Regulation through Litigation
Reports | Testimony | Articles Events
The CLP is devoted to documenting and analyzing how lawyers are increasingly supplanting elected representatives in making policy.
Class Actions
Reports| Testimony| Articles | Events
The CLP has been a leader in analyzing class action abuses; our empirical work helped form the basis for the landmark 2005 Class Action Fairness Act.
Employment Law
Reports | Articles
The CLP and Senior Fellow Walter Olson have long argued that employment law is stifling economic opportunities, often for the classes of individuals the law is designed to protect.
Medicine and the Law
Reports | Articles | Events
The CLP continues to examine how litigation—from mass tort suits over pharmaceuticals to medical malpractice suits against physicians—adversely affects Americans' health.
Products Liability
Reports | Testimony | Articles | Events
The CLP has long studied the problems with modern American law and continues to advance products liability thoughtful reforms.
Science in the Courts
Reports | Events
The CLP remains committed to Senior Fellow Peter Huber's long fight to purge junk science from the courtroom, which remains problematic, especially at the state court level.
Judicial Selection
Reports | Articles | Events
Because fair, honest judges are required to enforce the law, the CLP continues to research and write on the problems of judicial election and selection.
Reform Proposals
Reports | Testimony | Articles | Events
In addition to documenting America's litigation problems, the CLP continues to search for real, effective solutions to improve the nation's legal culture.

This fall, the Center for Legal Policy is honored to host our distinguished visiting scholar, Richard Epstein, for a special series of lectures. Following each event, Professor Epstein will summarize his remarks in a podcast interview.

To hear his first interview, in which Epstein discusses Stoneridge Investment v. Scientific-Atlanta with CLP Director Jim Copland, please click here.

Professor Epstein's second lecture was entitled, "Neither Liberal Nor Conservative: A Maverick's View of the Supreme Court." Jim Copland interviews Epstein about this discussion in a podcast, available here.


NEW REPORT
Civic Justice Report 10. Medical Malpractice Awards, Insurance, and Negligence: Which Are Related?
Alexander Tabarrok and Amanda Agan examine the root cause of soaring med-mal premiums.
· Press Release >>
· PPT Presentation
Price Gouging Is Bad Medicine, Wall Street Journal, Alex Tabarrok, 5-20-06

NEW TESTIMONY
America's Capital Markets: Maintaining Our Lead in the 21st Century
Testimony of James R. Copland, Director of the Center for Legal Policy at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, before the United States House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, April 26, 2006


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