Goverment agencies enjoy vast discretion and their decisoopns are hard to challenge. The Federal Tort Claims Act waives the federal govt;'s immunity to suit and allws the govt to be sued in tort like a private person, but I doubt if many such claims succeed given the scope of administartive discretion. One coild look it up. States enjoy sovereign immunity to suit unless they have expressly waived it or Congress has expressly pre-empted this immunity in a way that does not violate the 11th Amendment (now widely interpreted as barring most suits against states, although that's not what it _says_.) Government officials, in whose name you sue the state (complicated and rather incoherent legal doctrine here), thus a habeas suit is entitled Prisoner v. Warden, enjoy either absiolute immunity from suit (you cannot, for example, sue a judge for a bad decision), or qualified immunity,w hich means the official is immune from suit id he is wrong but the mistake was reasonable.
Long and short of it is that I don't think there is a lot of money flowing to private individuals from lawsuits against the federal or state governments.
>
> 2. Imposing added "transaction cost" for cutting
> corners on corporations -
> while justified - does not have to translate into
> private windfalls - it can
> be a sum paid to a public interest organization, as
> it is routinely
> practiced in Europe. Thus, if a plaintiff wins,
> he/she can win back actual
> losses (including time, lost earnings, actual legal
> cost etc.), but the
> "punitive damages" should go in their entirety to a
> public interest
> organization identified by the court; instead of
> ending up in the pockets of
> the defense attorneys and their clients.
See my previous post -- do you want to make it less economically feasible or attractive for lawyers to sue on behave of victism of civil rights violations, corporate malfeasance, and the like?
>
> 3. Private litigation does not address the systemic
> problem of standard
> enforcement. In fact, corporations can afford the
> risk of individual
> litigation if they know that otherwise standards are
> not enforced. This is
> a casino style public policy enforcement is really a
> gamble on someone
> willing to file a suit, a gamble on legal
> manipulations, etc.
Some and some. The NLRA is weak this way because it can't impose sanctions that hurt. Employment discrimination law is probably fairly effective, especially since the Bush I 1991 Civil Rights Act Amendments allowing for punitives for employment discrimination. You have to be a real moron as an employer to risk that now.
>
> 4. Using private litigation instead of public policy
> and taxation is a very
> ineffective way of recovering the cost of corporate
> malfeasance. In fact,
> the chances are that most of the cost of that
> malfeasance will never be
> recovered (cf. tobacco litigation). Passing an
> excise tax on products that
> are likely to produce public harm, and vigorous
> government enforcement of
> safety standards with hefty fees for violations are
> a much more effective
> way.
Again, depends. When corporations do a little harm to
a lot of people, a class action is probably a good way
to get therm to behave. When they poison a
neighborhood, it's a different story. Course the EPA
will often sue inthose cases an impose cleanup costs
on the corporations, which, unfortuantely, are
generally discharfeable in bankruptcy.
>
> Wojtek
>
>
>
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>
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