TJ Cox: “to respond to my colleagues, when something is 15 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, 100 years old, at some point…”

“to respond to my colleagues, when something is 15 years old, 20 years old, 30 years old, 100 years old, at some point the manufacturer stops being liable and the person who is responsible for maintaining the piece of equipment ought to become liable, and that is the common sense that is in this bill. The truth is that in my part of the country, in California, southern California, we have a lot of lawyers in West Los Angeles. Just that part of the city, there are more lawyers than in all of Japan. California, our fourth largest industry is lawyers, just judged by their legal fees. The only bigger industries in California are health care, the movie industry, and computers. No. 4 is lawyers fees. Our system is a great wheel of fortune, and to respond to my colleague from Massachusetts about the fraction of cases that have punitive damage awards or the fraction of cases that we are talking about here, over 90 percent of all cases never get a single day of trial. Therefore, they have no judgments; therefore, they have no damages. Everybody settles on the basis of what we euphemistically call transaction costs, by which we mean some sort of discounted estimation of the lawyers fees it would take to get to the other end, and, therefore, there is not any justice. Or if there is justice, it is entirely random. We started out in the House of Representatives with a much broader bill. We covered services as well as products. We covered health care lawsuits.…”