Arguing Class Actions is a monthly column by Adam J. Levitt for the National Law Journal.
Reprinted with permission from the May 4, 2026, edition of the National Law Journal. © 2026 ALM Media Properties, LLC. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.
For nearly 40 years, the tort reform movement has been built on the premise that America is drowning in lawsuits. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the insurance industry, medical trade associations, and defense-bar organizations like the Defense Research Institute (DRI) have repeated these warnings with remarkable consistency: Frivolous lawsuits are flooding the courts, juries are out of control, doctors are abandoning their practices, businesses can’t innovate, and insurance premiums will keep rising unless legislatures step in and impose “tort reform.”
It’s a tidy story, but one that the evidence has never supported. Despite that, the movement persists with ever-bigger players jumping into the fray. Today, the rideshare company Uber is pouring tens of millions of dollars into statewide ballot initiatives and other state level legislative efforts under the guise of reducing insurance premiums for everyday citizens. In New York state, the Assembly and the governor’s office are readily circulating unsupported talking points created by the Uber-backed group Citizens for Affordable Rates. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Uber and its counterparts are pushing state legislators to enact a bill that would insulate so-called “transportation network companies” from liability, even when their own systems contribute to a crash or when their vehicle operator violates state or federal law.
The remarkable thing about the tort reform campaign is not that it exists—corporations and insurers obviously want to reduce their liability exposure and restrict access to justice—but that its central empirical claims have been studied for decades and repeatedly fail to hold up. The litigation crisis that the movement overheatedly describes appears far more clearly in lobbying campaigns and advocacy reports than it does in the data.
The most obvious example is the argument that launched the modern tort reform movement: insurance premiums. For decades, insurers and their allies have insisted that lawsuits drive liability insurance costs upward. The logic is straightforward: If courts allow large verdicts and expansive liability, insurers must raise premiums to cover their exposure. Limit lawsuits and cap damages, the argument goes, and those savings will flow back to consumers in the form of lower premiums.
If that theory were correct, the results would be easy to see. States that adopt aggressive tort reform—damage caps, limits on claims, procedural barriers to litigation—should consistently experience lower insurance premiums than states that do not. But that’s not what the data shows. Rather, insurance premiums have historically moved in response to cycles that track the economics of the insurance industry itself rather than tort reform measures. When the liability insurers’ investment portfolios perform well, insurers can maintain or even reduce premiums. But, when investment markets perform poorly, insurers raise premiums to offset lost income. Indeed, premium spikes coincide with downturns in insurers’ investment portfolios—not with sudden increases in litigation. In other words, what’s often presented as a lawsuit crisis frequently turns out to be something far less dramatic: a bad year on Wall Street.
The medical malpractice insurance market offers perhaps the clearest example. For decades, insurers and medical lobbying groups have warned that malpractice lawsuits were driving physicians out of practice and forcing insurers to raise rates. State legislatures responded by enacting exactly the reforms those groups demanded: caps on damages, restrictions on lawsuits, and other liability limits. For example, in Ohio, damage caps were enacted in April 2005 with no consideration for future inflation adjustments. These rash policies have had grave consequences for victims of malpractice while still failing to accomplish their “goal” of decreasing malpractice premiums. Instead, malpractice premiums continue to rise and fall in the same cyclical patterns that they have always followed. If tort reform reliably lowered insurance premiums, insurers would be clamoring to show us the confirming data. Instead, however, the industry continues to rely on anecdotes and selective examples, because the broader empirical record doesn’t support the claim.
The same evidentiary gap appears in another central pillar of the tort reform narrative: the claim that the American legal system is drowning in frivolous lawsuits. But the idea that the United States is experiencing a tidal wave of lawsuits simply doesn’t align with the available evidence. Indeed, the facts show that civil filings in many courts have remained stable—or even declined—over time, despite significant population growth and economic expansion. For instance, data compiled by the National Center for State Courts through its Court Statistics Project shows that civil caseloads in state trial courts fell by approximately 6% between 2012 and 2024. Nor does the idea of a deluge of lawsuits align with the economics of litigation itself. Plaintiffs lawyers typically work on contingency fees, advancing substantial costs and recovering nothing if the case fails. Complex litigation can require hundreds of thousands—or even millions—of dollars in expert fees, discovery expenses, and attorney time. The suggestion that lawyers routinely invest those resources in meritless cases isn’t just implausible, it’s economically irrational.
In reality, the far more common problem is that injured people never sue at all. Research consistently shows that many individuals harmed by negligence never pursue legal claims because litigation is expensive, time-consuming, and intimidating. Many victims lack access to legal representation or conclude that the process simply is not worth the ordeal. If there’s an access to justice problem in the United States, it doesn’t involve too many lawsuits. Rather, it involves the enormous amount of wrongdoing that never results in one.
The legend of the “runaway jury” fares no better under scrutiny. Tort reform advocates frequently point to headline-grabbing “nuclear” verdicts as proof that juries have lost control of the civil justice system. These numbers appear regularly in advocacy reports and legislative hearings as evidence of a system in chaos. What those narratives rarely acknowledge, however, is everything that happens after the verdict. Post-verdict motions require trial judges to review awards for excessiveness. Then, appellate courts often review them again. Reductions are common, and some verdicts disappear entirely on appeal. The sensational numbers that fuel the tort reform narrative often bear little resemblance to the amounts ultimately paid. But they do reflect a jury’s response to a set of facts in a given case. Correspondingly, the entire “nuclear verdict” contention, while catnip for journalists seeking sensational headlines, arises from the insurance industry’s—and its allies’—reductive contention of “defense verdict, good; small verdict, bad; large verdict, ‘nuclear’,” while blithely ignoring the underlying facts and justifications for that verdict.
Moreover, “tort reform” advocates prefer to ignore the fundamental importance grounded in the guarantee to a civil jury trial afforded by the Seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Each “tort reform” enactment is another erosion of that very guarantee. The legal system already contains multiple layers of review designed to ensure that verdicts remain within reasonable bounds. Pretending that those safeguards don’t exist may make for effective advocacy, but it doesn’t accurately describe how the system operates. In truth, juries generally perform the function that they were designed to perform: evaluating evidence, weighing credibility, and deciding whether someone should be held responsible for harm.
The dirty little secret for corporations and their advocates, however, is that juries present a deeper challenge. Juries introduce uncertainty. When companies appear before juries, they can’t rely on lobbying budgets, regulatory relationships, or political influence. They must explain their conduct to ordinary citizens who weren’t invited into the boardroom. For institutions accustomed to controlling risk through contracts and regulation, that unpredictability is uncomfortable. “Tort reform” is the effort to eliminate it.
The argument that liability suppresses innovation follows the same familiar script. Businesses, we’re told, can’t develop new products or expand their operations because the threat of litigation hangs over every decision. But history suggests something very different. Civil litigation has repeatedly exposed dangerous products and unsafe practices that regulators failed to detect—or that corporations deliberately concealed. Discovery in tort cases has uncovered internal documents revealing defective product designs, hazardous pharmaceuticals, toxic industrial practices, and corporate decisions that prioritized profit over safety. Those revelations didn’t emerge because companies volunteered them; rather, they emerged because litigation forced companies to produce evidence and confront their own misgivings in a public forum. Liability didn’t suppress innovation in those cases; it forced companies to innovate more responsibly.
Which brings us to the central fact that the tort reform movement rarely acknowledges: When legislatures cap damages or restrict lawsuits, the cost of wrongdoing doesn’t disappear. It simply moves. Instead of being borne by the corporation responsible for the harm, the financial burden shifts to injured individuals, their families, and often the public.
Catastrophic injuries don’t vanish because recovery has been limited in court. Rather, they become the responsibility of healthcare systems, disability programs, and taxpayers. In that sense, tort reform frequently functions less as legal reform than as a form of corporate subsidy. The costs created by private misconduct are redistributed to the people least able to bear them.
None of this should be surprising. Corporations and insurers have rational economic incentives to reduce their liability exposure. What’s striking is how successfully they’ve been able to frame that objective as a public necessity, and how passively the public has fallen for it. Indeed, after decades of lobbying and repetition, the tort reform narrative has acquired the veneer of common sense. Many policymakers now speak of a litigation crisis as though it were an established fact. But when the empirical claims behind a policy agenda repeatedly fail—when insurance premiums do not fall, when lawsuits are not exploding, when juries are not unhinged, and when innovation is not stifled—the conclusion becomes difficult to avoid. The litigation crisis that tort reform was designed to solve exists largely in advocacy campaigns and press releases.
The civil justice system, imperfect though it may be, continues to perform one of its most important functions: allowing ordinary people to demand accountability from powerful institutions. And that, more than any mythical explosion of lawsuits, is what the tort reform movement has been trying to “fix” all along.
Adam J. Levitt is a founding partner of DiCello Levitt, where he heads the firm’s class action and public client practice groups. He can be reached at alevitt@dicellolevitt.com
Thank you to DiCello Levitt associate Justin Abbarno for contributing to this column.
