Litigation Explosion

The fact that your editorial, “Has the ‘Litigation Explosion’ Blasted Away Common Sense?” (March 22), legitimizes the infamous case of “hot McDonald’s coffee spillage” reduces the rest of the article to mindless chatter. Your editorial argues that the punitive damages were “reduced heavily” after the verdict from $2.7 million to $480,000. It would take the average American worker 20 years to earn the revised sum. And the case is absolutely ridiculous. When you buy coffee you expect to receive a hot beverage. At one time or another everyone has burned a hand or tongue. And when you do, you pour cold water over the injury and accept it as the risk for drinking the stuff.

The litigation explosion is serious for the fear it creates as much as the ridiculous sums of money involved. And I cannot be guaranteed hot coffee when I purchase it at a restaurant.

RANDY HARRIS

Huntington Beach

Yet again your newspaper has thrown its support behind Big Law, in all its power and majesty. Instead of calling for meaningful legal reform from Congress, you offer a watered-down version that will merely invite a Draconian repression somewhere up the line.

Your stance favoring an out-of-control tort system that is anti-competitive for American business is particularly hurtful to smaller enterprises. Every poll indicates a growing public awareness of the dark side of the legal profession with its greed and self-dealing.

California has more lawyers than Japan has engineers and the United States has more lawyers than all Europe combined (check it out). This leads me to suggest that the problem with lawyers is threefold in nature: they are overpaid, over numerous and over here.

JEAN PRICE

Santa Monica

Raymond Paul Johnson (letter, March 27) tries to link a $250,000 cap on damages to “the lifetime care” of an injured patient. In fact, the only cap on compensatory damages in the Common Sense Product Liability and Legal Reform Act of 1995 applies to the non-economic damages of an injured patient in a health-care lawsuit. In the words of the act, this cap applies to compensation for “injured feelings, such as pain and suffering and emotional distress.” Any award necessary to compensate the patient for “lifetime care” or any other economic damages is not restricted.

GORDON T. OWNBY

General Counsel, Cooperative

of American Physicians, Inc./Mutual

Protection Trust, Los Angeles