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Some 600 members of the National Association of Manufacturers descended on Washington last week to lobby for the Danforth bill, which besides setting national standards for product-liability suits would establish a new procedure for speedy out-of-court settlement of claims for economic damages. They first gathered at the Marriott Hotel to swap horror stories and pep talks. Under present legal rules, "you're afraid to try anything, put any new product on the market," cried Gust Headbloom, president of Michigan's Apex Broach & Machinery Co. Peter J. Nord, president of Schauer Manufacturing Corp. in Cincinnati, which makes battery-charging machines, drew loud applause by declaring, "There are going to be people who are dumb and stupid and screw up no matter what we do." Ohio Democratic Congressman Thomas Luken showed up to cheer on the manufacturers. Said he: "Probably no recent issue has snowballed so quickly."
After eating paper-bag lunches, the manufacturers boarded buses to Capitol Hill to buttonhole legislators from their home states. So many Michiganders packed into the office of Democratic Senator Carl Levin that several of the businessmen had to perch on upended attaché cases. Levin warned them that "the whole spirit of Congress is to get away from regulation," but promised to take a careful look at the Danforth bill. Plaintiffs' attorneys, needless to say, oppose all tort-reform plans. They commonly accuse insurers of creating a sense of crisis to enact laws that would deny just compensation to victims of malpractice or injury. More troubling, they insist that all the tort-reform ideas would undermine a fundamental principle of democracy: the idea that any citizen should have unrestricted access to the courts for redress of any grievances he might suffer. Robert Habush, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers, says of the tort-reform movement, "In my 25 years in law, this is as serious a threat to the civil justice system as I have ever seen. People have decided there is going to be a hanging, and it is just a question of what tree and what rope."
In all probability, that seriously overstates the case. Present and former trial lawyers populate state legislatures and Congress in numbers large enough to wield formidable blocking power. There is a question, too, of whether the courts would uphold any serious tort reforms that might be enacted. One omen: the Cook County, Ill., circuit court last year ruled that major parts of a newly enacted law stretching out damage awards in medical malpractice cases violated the Illinois constitution.