The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law

Appendix 3 -- Examples of Ridiculing and Demeaning of Trial Lawyers

Reprinted with special Permission of King Features Syndicate

Lawyers and Other Reptiles. 'A California lawyer has filed a $100,000 libel lawsuit against GTE Directories Sales Corp., alleging that the publisher listed her name and phone number in at least one yellow pages directory under "Reptiles".' At Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse website. [103]

Laughing at Lawyers, Funny Lawyer Quotes, Jokes & Cartoons, the Lawyer Joke Exchange. Two Web collections located at a tort reform advocacy website, Power-of-attorneys.com, which also hosts Class Action Law Update, Personal Injury Lawsuits and Legal Information. [104]

Lawyers Congregate To Pick Your Food (And Your Pocket). "Listen carefully when you hear professor [Richard] Daynard and his trial lawyer friends talk about fat deposits," cautions Center for Consumer Freedom Executive Director Rick Berman in a Boston Herald op-ed. "They're really referring to their bank accounts, not your love handles."The Center for Consumer Freedom [105]

Looney Lawsuits. A web collection of silly-sounding lawsuits. American Tort Reform Association. [106]

An example of organizational interconnectedness, utilizing ridicule

The connections in the example: Fox News, Cato Institute, JunkScience.com

"Scare-Mongering Over 'Hillybilly Heroin' Deprives the Rest of Us." Published at Fox News by Steven Milloy, publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of the upcoming book Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

"The OxyContin controversy is a liberal's dream come true. Sympathetic ö almost heroic ö dopeheads avenged by government agencies and trial lawyers swarming all over the greedy and malfeasant drug company." [107]