[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 42 (Tuesday, March 7, 1995)]
[House]
[Page H2732]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




THE COMMON SENSE LEGAL REFORM ACT WILL RESTORE THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF 
                                  LAW

  (Mr. WHITE asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. WHITE. Mr. Speaker, I would like to spend just a couple minutes 
this morning talking about my second year in law school, not the first 
year; the first year we studied the traditional principles of law and I 
understood those. In the second year we started to get into the more 
recent developments that we have seen in our legal system, and those, 
frankly, I did not often understand.
  These are principles, for example, that allow someone who is only 
responsible for 10 percent of the damages caused to someone to be 
liable for 100 percent of all the payments that have to be made. It 
allows someone who is drunk to recover full damages, even though it was 
his drunkenness or the fact that he was on drugs that caused his own 
damages.
  Frankly, Mr. Speaker, that is something I did not understand, and 15 
years of practicing law confirmed to me that our legal system is 
dramatically out of whack. That is why I am so happy to be here today 
as we debate the Common Sense Legal Reform Act.
  This act will do many things, but most important, Mr. Speaker, it 
will restore the principles that our law used to be based on back to 
the law today, principles of personal responsibility, principles of 
right and wrong. I urge my colleagues to vote for it.

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