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THE BHOPALIZATION OF AMERICAN TORT LAW 96 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. causes with new effects many decades later. This means that some excellent scientists have a lot to answer for. Bruce Ames, for one, has had a particularly mischievous impact in the legal world. It is very convenient for a lawyer representing a plaintiff who has (or fears he one day may have) cancer, to be able to label a toxin as an Ames- proven mutagen and therefore a likely carcinogen. Then the defendant's lawyer must begin quibbling (or so it will seem to the lay jury) about dose-response limits, nonzero thresholds, the ubiquity of all-natural carcinogens, and so on. And of course, Ames is not the only culprit. Many other scientists who have unraveled the etiology of cancer and various chronic illnesses and revealed the long lag times between exposure to a toxin and the onset of disease are responsible, far more than any lawyer, for the law's effective abandonment of statutes of limitation for damage actions and the "imminent harm" prerequisites for injunctions. Norman Rasmussen has been another major accessory before the fact in the creation of new tort law. Give me a scientist who is willing to put a number âany numberâon a risk of dying, and I will give you a plaintiff's lawyer who is willing to wave that number in court. Then the defendant's lawyer must once again begin quibbling about the inherently self-negating aspects of risk assessment, the real purpose of conducting probabilistic risk assessment in the first place, the conservatism in the "source term," and so on. And again, Rasmussen alone should not shoulder all the blame. As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has systematically identified, analyzed, and quantified the hazards of nuclear power plants, the plaintiffs' bar has licked its collective chops in anticipation of great meals to come. CAN THE LEGAL SYSTEM COPE? Understandably enough, many lawyers recognize the legal flood precipitated by these scientific storms as great progress for the profession. Expanding tort law hunting grounds (and extending the season to boot) gives lawyers and the courts enormous power to reshape the political and economic landscape. A separate question, however, is to determine who has benefited by this dramatic expansion in the demographic and temporal reach of tort law. Notwithstanding the most pious and self-serving claims of the plaintiffs' bar, and despite the startling support that tort lawyers have received from various "consumer protection" and "public interest" pressure groups, it increasingly appears that the principal and perhaps exclusive beneficiaries have been lawyers themselves, accompanied by only the tiniest group of self-selected or randomly selected consumers.
