California is back in the top spot of the 20th annual American Tort Reform Foundation (ATRF)’s Judicial Hellhole ranking after having dropped to No. 3 last year.
“It’s just the sheer volume of the number of issues, ranging from the state's Lemon Law to the expansion of the state Private Attorney General Act (PAGA) and federal court being a venue for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA),” said Tiger Joyce, president of the American Tort Reform Association (ATRA).
Some 206,474 jobs are lost each year as a result of excessive tort costs and each Californian is paying a tort tax of some $574, according to a John Dunham & Associates study, but it says that if the legislature enacted reforms targeting lawsuit abuse, the state would save more than $22 billion.
“The nature of these issues are contributing to a continuing growth and expansion of liability and seemingly, from our perspective, without any countervailing or consideration of their negative implications,” Joyce told the Southern California Record.
In addition to alleged abuses of the Song-Beverly Consumer Warranty Act (the state's lemon law), ADA, and PAGA, the report negatively cites food and beverage class action lawsuits, the expansion of public nuisance laws to include climate change, a pro-plaintiff legislature pushing liability expansion, strict liability for e-commerce companies, and Prop-65 litigation unjustly burdening companies with cancer claims.
New York and the Georgia Supreme Court landed in second and third place, respectively, after California in ATRF's 2021-2022 Judicial Hellhole report.
“We highlight why we think these different jurisdictions are problematic from the standpoint of civil litigation and looking at it mostly from the perspective of corporate defendants who find themselves in these courts,” Joyce said.
California’s fall in the Judicial Hellhole ranking last year was not indicative of an improvement in the state’s civil justice system, but rather results from Pennsylvania and New York City rising up the ranks of the list of judicial hellholes, according to the 2020-2021 ranking.
“We think having a dialogue about these issues and about these jurisdictions is an important part of what we hope will end in some successful reform effort,” Joyce added.