• The civil justice system is the arm of America’s legal system that gives people who have been harmed by the actions of others their day in civil court to seek fair compensation for their injuries, regardless of whether a criminal law has been broken.

• Corporations can not be sent to jail like individuals, so the civil justice system ensures that everyone, even powerful corporations and our government, abides by the laws that protect people against fraud, discrimination, injury from dangerous products, and other violations of their rights.

• Many measures can make the legal system work more effectively for regular Americans and not just big corporations and the government. The candidates can begin with the following six simple proposals:

• Americans should have a right to a lawyer: Our laws guarantee the right to a lawyer in criminal cases but not in cases that determine human needs like housing or sustenance. Because in court the deck is stacked against anyone without a lawyer, people are losing their homes, child custody and other important rights. Free legal representation and state-run legal aid services only cover twenty percent of the legal needs of the poor. The next President must create a federal right to counsel in legal matters involving important human needs like housing, sustenance, safety, health, and child custody. 

• Americans should not be forced or tricked into signing away their rights: Many common contracts—for credit cards, loans, cell phones, mortgages, health care agreements, employment contracts, and a host of others—now take away a person’s right to sue if he or she becomes the victim of fraud, employment discrimination, injury from defective products, or other wrongdoing. These contracts require victims to go to private arbitration instead of a court of law. Arbitration, a non-public system for resolving disputes, is shown to be biased towards corporations and against regular people. One study shows corporations win in arbitration by a 94% margin. The next President should restore the Federal Arbitration Act and declare binding mandatory arbitration agreements to be unenforceable in the case of consumer, employment, and other contracts where an imbalance of power exists.

• States have a right to protect their residents from corporate abuse: States like Maine, Nevada and California have created strong public interest laws such as laws to reduce pollution yet the federal government has preempted these forward-thinking states from implementing them. The Federal government has blocked public interest policies that States have enacted including increased highway safety and HMO accountability. The next President can reverse course and allow states that have a more socially conscious approach to the court system to continue to protect their citizens.

• Corporations should not use the court system to hide from the public: The American public deserves to know when they are being exposed to something harmful to their health and safety, but lawsuit settlements allow corporations to hide important details about bad behavior that affects the public. In essence, corporations can pay their way out of public scrutiny through secret settlements. For example a factory could contaminate a town’s water supply, but because of a secret court settlement between the factory and the town, neighboring towns might never learn that their water is contaminated too. Our next President should support federal anti-secrecy legislation prohibiting judges from approving confidentiality agreements that conceal issues pertinent to public health and safety.

• Increasing patient safety should be the priority of government, not limiting compensation for those who are harmed: The American healthcare system will be improved not by weakening patients’ access to justice if they’re harmed, but through sensible reforms to improve patient safety so that fewer patients will ever even need to enter a courtroom. Instead of reducing risk, politicians point to medical malpractice insurance rates to push for limits on how much restitution injured patients can receive. There is no strong connection between the cost of malpractice insurance and the amount of lawsuits filed and for nearly two decades, medical malpractice verdicts and medical malpractice premiums have taken up less than two percent of total U.S. health care costs.

• End the insurance industry practice of intentionally denying valid insurance claims: The systematic denial of legitimate insurance claims is a tactic insurance companies use in the hopes that the consumer will get fed up and just pay out of pocket. While insurance companies enjoy record-setting profits, responsible Americans who invested in insurance have been left largely unprotected. The next President should support the repeal of the federal law that protects the insurance industry, the McCarran-Ferguson Act. He or she should also support the establishment of national legislation that would protect policyholders against bad faith claims denials.

• We are only an effective leader and a few simple, common sense solutions away from improving Americans’ access to civil justice. The public deserves a national leader who is concerned about their rights and committed to preserving Americans’ access to the court system. To begin, the next President can demonstrate this commitment by embracing the simple, common-sense solutions proposed in this report.