William F. Smith: “First of all, if a foreign corporation is involved, that does not prevent someone from having their day in court. The…”

“First of all, if a foreign corporation is involved, that does not prevent someone from having their day in court. The bill clearly says that it is where the plaintiff lives, and if one is a U.S. citizen, most likely they are going to live in the United States, or where the injury occurred, and the injury would have occurred in this country. So that takes care of their concerns there. Another previous speaker from Massachusetts started off by talking about the ban on assault weapons. This bill has nothing to do with that, but we do attempt to ban frivolous lawsuits, and in that we are successful. But the gentleman from Massachusetts did make a good point, and I will embrace it entirely, and that is he acknowledged, which I thought was quite an admission, that today there are, in fact, even by his own standards, 11,000 frivolous lawsuits a year. I guarantee my colleagues that 99 percent of the American people think 11,000 frivolous lawsuits a year today is 11,000 frivolous lawsuits too many.”