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6 Yale L.J. 328 (October 1896- 1897)
Personal Injury Litigation

handle is hein.journals/ylr6 and id is 332 raw text is: YALE LA W JOURNAL. PERSONAL INJURY LITIGATION. A writer in the North American Review of February, 1897, has performed a public service by calling attention to the enor- mous increase of actions claiming damages for personal injuries or for death resulting therefrom. Crude and limited as are the statistics he gives enough is shown to startle the ordinary reader who is not familiar with the subject. Yet there are considera- tions not adverted to by him which are quite as interesting to one seriously thinking out some remedy for an obvious evil. That evil is the corrupted public sentiment in favor of looting any public or quasi-public treasury in aid of private suffering or private want, if not private greed. Its expression is not confined to the jury-box nor to personal injury verdicts. It appears in constitutional conventions, legislatures and in Congress. Its operation is sometimes bold, as in pension legislation of high and low degree, appropriations for private benefit under the disguise of public needs, in many forms, and in all kinds 6f legislation to make this species of pillage easy by removing whatever barriers are found in the ancient law and the repug- nance of our ancestors; and sometimes it is more insidious and crafty, as- in proposed reforms of practice which have the pur- pose of ousting the bench from all power to hinder the plunder- ing process. If a legislator wishes by statute to direct how the judge shall instruct the jury generally you will find in him or those who are behind him the speculators, runners and brokers in damages for personal injuries mentioned by the writer in the Nort. American Review. Nor is it strange that men coming into the jury-box from the flood tides of a periodical literature devoted to an agitation for relief from individual suffering by socialistic combinations of the poor against the rich, should find the verdict of a jury against a corporation a most convenient sort of combination to mitigate the suffering at least in this one case. Are not all corporations a trust organized by capital to oppress labor? And this being so is not the denial by this corporation of its liability to this plaintiff a part of the conspiracy of the rich to oppress

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