It is ironic that within paragraphs of Seth Stern’s complaint about a “policy debate ruled by anecdote” and a “media and public that don’t care much for the subtleties of civil litigation,” he mentions the so-called exploding Ford Pinto, a much more insidious urban legend promulgated by the plaintiffs bar and media than any reformer’s true story of meritless spilled-coffee lawsuits [“How the Plaintiffs Bar Lost the War.”]

Resident Fellow Theodore Frank

As professor Gary Schwartz demonstrated in his 1991 Rutgers Law Review article, the Pinto was as safe as or safer than comparable subcompact cars. Indiana prosecutors acknowledged that the Pinto was no more likely to “explode” than the average car on the road in the mid-1970s: It comprised 1.9 percent of cars on the road and 1.9 percent of fatal accidents accompanied by fire.

Plaintiffs lawyers have lost the public opinion war, but it is because their abuses have led them to lose the public policy debate on the merits--which is why the Association of Trial Lawyers of America is forced to resort to superficial name changes in its battle against liability reform. Overlawyered.com and PointOfLaw.com (two Web sites I write for) are able to document dozens of lawsuits and verdicts a month illustrating the need for continued civil justice reform without once resorting to the “tort-reform tall tales” to which Stern alludes.

Ted Frank is a resident fellow at director of the Liability Project at AEI.