In the inimitable words of Yogi Berra, it's déja vu all over again. One year ago, we wrote on this page "The world's greatest deliberative body, a.k.a. the U. S. Senate, has labored mightily and brought forth failure." The issue then was medical liability, the Patients First Act of 2003. The issue now was the Class Action Fairness Act.
The runaway tort system in America is a genuine debacle that is of direct and vital interest to the manufacturing community because it is causing serious economic harm and, perhaps more importantly, distorting the cause of justice. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM, Washington) examines the magnitude of this economic harm in great detail in its report How Structural Costs Imposed on U.S. Manufacturers Harm Workers and Threaten Competitiveness, which you can find on NAM's Web site, www.nam.org.