A new think-tank report discusses the evolution in environmental and toxic tort litigation. The Manhattan Institute Center for Legal Policy publishes reports and updates that shed light on the size, scope, and inner workings of what they call “America’s lawsuit industry” at TrialLawyersInc.com.

The new report, “Un-natural Claims,” discusses the trend to use litigation to supplant or supplement regulation and legislation of environmental and toxic hazards.  Because tort law is necessarily retrospective, not prospective (plaintiffs traditionally must show that they have actually been injured and that the party being sued caused the injury), and because it makes sense to prevent environmental injuries in advance, instead of addressing them after they occur, advanced economies have developed regulatory regimes that place boundaries around economic activities that risk generating environmental damage.

Nuisance suits, for example, do not manage environmental harms well. Injuries are sometimes too dispersed to be remedied by damage awards to individuals, and causation too speculative or remote to meet historical legal norms. Lay juries are generally ill-equipped to make scientific judgments on complex environmental questions, argues the report.  Yet, increasingly, plaintiffs and activists have sought to use tort law to supplant regulation, often by seeking broad injunctive relief. The report argues that such suits seek to circumvent statutory and regulatory schemes and turn the courts into alternative environmental regulators.

The report offers the recent global warming litigation as a dire example.  In such suits, activist groups—or state attorneys general seeking their support—are trying to make an end run around regulators or legislatures to achieve policy goals. The report warns that one should not assume that pecuniary motives are absent from such suits: in addition to earning themselves substantial publicity, the state AGs often receive the largesse of lawyers involved in the form of direct or in-kind campaign assistance; and trial lawyers get to enlist the state attorneys general to press for judicial rulings that would make future litigation more profitable. In some cases, they get hefty contingency fees for doing the states’ work.

Worth a look.