[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 73 (Thursday, May 4, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Page S6142]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      JOINT AND SEVERAL LIABILITY

  Mr. COVERDELL. Mr. President, I rise to speak on behalf of the 
Abraham amendment. I am not a lawyer, and I am glad that I can take a 
chance here, as a small businessman, to bring perspective on the 
question a little bit out of a legal arena. This whole question of 
joint and several liability, which means to an everyday person that if 
there is a wrongdoing that occurs and a legal dispute emerges about it, 
that if several parties are involved, and let us say party A is 
responsible for 90 percent of the wrongdoing and party B is responsible 
for 10 percent of the wrongdoing,
 and a suit is filed against the two of them, if it is determined by 
the legal process that party A, who was responsible for 90 percent of 
the wrongdoing, does not have any money, then the person to go after is 
party B who, while only sharing 10 percent of the responsibility, for 
one reason or another, has access to large sums of money. Therefore, he 
is the target.

  Mr. President, I think in the American way that is just considered 
not fair. That is making two victims out of the crisis: The person to 
whom the wrongdoing occurred, and then this other party who happens to 
be in the arena, who does not share much of the responsibility, but 
just has resources. Therefore, that entity becomes the target.
  In American A-B-C logic all across the country, it is not right for 
somebody who does not bear the responsibility, or much of it, to be the 
target of paying up just because they have money.
  We have read several of these ludicrous stories of a person coming 
out of the McDonald's, spilling their milk shake, getting into an 
accident with somebody, suing the person they got into the accident 
with but that person is uninsured, so they sue McDonald's.
  Mr. President, in light of the time, I will not dwell on this much 
more. I did take an interest in this Newsweek article--I am sure it has 
been talked about before--with the legal tax on the everyday consumer. 
Because of the kinds of things I have just been talking about, 
everybody is scared to death. So they build in all kinds of defensive 
tests and costs to protect themselves. An 8-foot ladder that costs 
$119.33, $23 of the cost is now a product of our legal system.
  A tonsillectomy which costs $578 has $191 built into it because of 
our legal system. That is why 80 percent of the American public support 
the broadening of legal reform that we have been battling here for the 
last 2 weeks.
  I will just close by saying once again that it is fundamentally wrong 
to make people who have a very small responsibility, if any, be the 
subject of having to pay damages simply because they were in the area 
or arena, or we had a situation where, as I said a moment ago, 90 
percent of the responsibility belongs to person A and 10 percent to 
person B, but person B has resources, so they will ruin that person's 
life, ruin that victim's personal business, simply because they had 
resources and were responsible.
  That is fundamentally unfair. That is why so many Americans support 
this amendment on joint and several liability, which means a person is 
responsible, financially, for their proportional share of what went 
wrong.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  

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