Will Trump attack your right to sue? Don’t count on it. | Opinion

Perennial political pontificator Ralph Nader made a bold prediction recently via X, challenging plaintiff tort lawyers to “rise to the occasion” because “Trump and the Trumpsters are coming after tort law and the civil justice system.”

Nader claims they are “backed by the big corporate tortfeasors, the insurance companies and their academic minions.”

Nader’s efforts to protect the right to trial by jury are admirable, but his prediction is alarmist. Pushing tort reform at the federal level is extremely low on Trump’s radar and runs contrary to his core beliefs. Put more directly, tort reform makes no common sense.

Insurers are inherently focused on driving profits through two primary means: making more money in interest off the premium dollars they collect and paying less of those premium dollars out in claims.

This will always be their goal. A Trump presidency will have a major impact on both, but in ways far more complicated than Nader suggests. Stripping away the rights of jurors to assess evidence in a courtroom will not even move the needle.

Trump’s economic policies, including deregulation, will hopefully fuel an economic surge and drive investment returns.

At the same time, rollbacks on climate regulations and the associated climate-related risks have long been on insurers’ radars due to the impact of weather events on property damage claims.

In a September 2024 letter to lawmakers, National Association of Insurance Commissioners leaders wrote “No other financial product or service so directly and acutely illustrates the economic cost of climate-related risks as property insurance.” A 2023 study indicated 57% of adults have incurred costs from extreme weather over the past decade. A 2021 study indicated 5.3% of all insured homes had a claim in 2021.

Both of these factors — interest rates and climate-related property claims — are big ticket items. Individual jury verdicts are not.

Even if individual jury awards did have a large impact on big business, removing the right to trial by jury would run contrary to Trump’s central agenda: improving the plight of the common man and woman. Stripping away the right of the common man to have his wages paid for by an insurance company when he sustains a career-ending injury would not improve his plight.

Telling a group of jurors that they can’t be trusted to look another man in the eye, weigh his credibility and reach a fair and just verdict on his case does not improve their plight.

President-elect Trump believes he has a mandate to bring common sense to our country. The problem with tort reform is that it’s never made common sense. Why would a bunch of hard-working jurors want the government to come in and tell them how much they can or can’t award their neighbor for his case — particularly when that same government has already trusted those same jurors to vote and pay taxes?

No one has ever believed the right to bring their own case for damages should be limited in any way. This is why they’ll routinely make clear they are “not the suing type” when they see a lawyer for their own case.

In reality, they simply never needed to be “the suing type,” until they did. Many people are a critic of everyone else’s cases but an advocate of their own.

No one who ever had their lawsuit capped by the government would believe a cap was a good idea. And everyone who drives, works, sees a doctor, uses products or takes medication may have their own lawsuit someday.

It’s all common sense, and common sense will overflow the bathtub of Donald Trump’s second presidency. I can already see the ceiling below it, leaking.

President Trump will not waste time enacting pointless reform which hardly moves the needle for the insurers and corporations who have sought this reform for decades as a matter of course — after all, why not ask?

President Trump will not tell those same voters who delivered him a victory and political comeback for the ages that he continues to trust their vote in the voting booth, but not their vote in a jury room.

One can see where Ralph Nader is coming from — he’s seen a lot of aggressive tort reform over his lifetime. But he’s wrong about Donald Trump’s agenda. Common sense tells me so.

This story was originally published December 10, 2024 at 5:00 AM.