An astonishing new article from JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that at least 150,000 people per year may be needlessly killed, rendered disabled, or otherwise harmed due to misdiagnoses in doctors' offices. Johns Hopkins, whose researchers authored this study, have been documenting epidemic levels of preventable medical...

Here's a little known bit of American history trivia: The American colonists fought the Revolutionary War in significant part over England's repeated attempts to restrict jury trials. Not only that, the U.S. Constitution was nearly defeated over its failure to guarantee the right to civil jury trial. (The Seventh Amendment...

In one of this week's most anti-climatic news story, the Center for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally confirmed what everyone knew: The origin of the deadly meningitis outbreak was fungus found in steroid shots produced by the New England Compounding Center (NECC) in...

This week, U.S. House leaders will bring to the floor H.R. 5, legislation that would limit the legal rights of injured patients and families of those killed by negligent health care. This bill is so outrageously broad that it covers not only cases involving medical malpractice, but also...

If you know anything about the so-called "tort reform" movement in the United States, you may know that it has turned the civil jury system into an embattled and vulnerable institution. From at least the 1980s until today, this country has experienced a non-stop barrage of legislative and, in some...

When people talk about medical malpractice "reform," they are usually not talking about reducing the epidemic of medical errors in hospitals or instituting proven measures to actually reduce injuries, deaths, claims and lawsuits. No, they're usually talking about making it more difficult for patients injured by...

The one-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and disastrous oil gusher that followed isn't just a day to remember the 11 brave workers who were killed and fume about all that's gone wrong in the Gulf ever since. This day actually carries very real legal...

As the attorney who represented the community group TMI Alert during the legal battle over the "restart" of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor (the sister plant to the damaged Unit 2), I learned quite a bit about this accident that was never supposed to happen (sound familiar?). Here...

Whatever has been going on behind the closed doors of Governor Andrew Cuomo's Medicaid Redesign Team, loaded with self-dealing lobbyists and hospital executives who make Wall Street level salaries, it's time for New Yorkers to say enough.

Many have already complained...

On Wednesday, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee began marking up a bill (H.R. 5) that is a top priority for some in the new Republican House -- federalizing state medical malpractice laws by taking away the legal rights of sick and injured patients. (Incredibly, Tea Party Caucus member Rep. Ted...

I must admit that I'm new to the world of legal ethics. I don't practice law in the traditional sense. I don't have clients. It never seemed to be the most exciting or important area of law to study. I was wrong.

Late Wednesday, in a strong rebuke to BP...

This week, our brand new U.S. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) announced that he'll be convening hearings soon "to examine the constitutional concerns surrounding ObamaCare and the role medical malpractice reform can play in reducing health care costs." In other words, we once again...

With so much happening legislatively this week and the holidays and all, even startling new Senate reports were somewhat overlooked. This one deserves attention, however.

On December 21, 2010, New Jersey Senators Menedez and Lautenberg and New York Senators Schumer and Gillibrand released a scathing new report called,

About a year and a half ago, the New Yorker magazine published a widely-circulated article by Dr. Atul Gawande, called "The Cost Conundrum; What a Texas town can teach us about health care," which explored why the town of McAllen, Texas, "was the country's most expensive place for...

Twelve years ago, I got together with some consumer advocates from around the country and formed the Center for Justice & Democracy. Our mission has always been to protect access to the civil courts for everyday people and fight attempts to limit corporate accountability for wrongdoing.

Our civil...

Please bookmark this post and come back to it in a year or so. I say this because our collective memory, and especially that of mainstream news organizations, can be pretty short sometimes.

In case you haven't noticed, your liability insurance rates have been fairly stable for a few...

Today's New York Times carries a column by recently-resigned budget director Peter Orszag, which begins with Orszag complaining that the health insurance reform bill did not do enough to federally "reform" state medical malpractice laws. He argues that Congress should "shield from malpractice liability any doctors who followed...

Last week, a student walked into the offices of the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, asking to see the organization's public 990 tax forms. Odd, thought Frank Knapp Jr., the organizations' president and CEO. There was nothing legally wrong with this request, of course. But this...

Last week, the right-wing, corporate-backed Pacific Research Institute, well-known tobacco industry apologist, produced a dense yet nutty "statistical" analysis of state tort systems (bottom line: the fewer cases against corporate wrongdoers, the better). Now, we've seen these kinds of fabricated "rankings" before...

Teachable moments can come almost anytime, from anywhere. The recent history of corporate and professional breakdowns and mess-ups should provide a number of them. Bob Herbert raised the issue in a stinging New York Times column recently when he asked, "Will we learn anything...