Torts & Presidential Politics: Obama

It does seem rather early to be worrying about presidential politics, but since roughly 3,000 candidates are out there already, it seems like a fair time to take an early look.  So this is the first in an occasional series of posts looking to see what the various candidates have on their websites about issues relating to tort law.  I assume that most candidates have a position paper on most of the relevant issues available on request; that’s not what I’m looking for.  I’m looking to see if they consider the issue important enough to have online.

(As an aside, I don’t know that I think that tort issues are even in my top 10 issues for presidential candidates, so their absence from a candidate’s website isn’t particularly concerning to me.  But it’s still an interesting question.)

Today: Barack Obama and his website.  The site has nothing that I can see directly on point, though it does have a healthcare page.  A half-dozen posts on the site reference tort law, but so far as I can tell, they’re all on “my.barackobmama.com” subdomains — i.e., blogs of supporters or others and comments thereon.

Elsewhere, Obama has been quoted as stating in 2004 that “Anyone who denies there’s a crisis with medical malpractice insurance is probably a trial lawyer.”  The cited source is no longer an active URL, but here [PDF] is the new location for the same bulletin, and sure enough, it says that.

Update: I should have originally noted that I’ve previously posted about a bill that Obama and Clinton cosponsored that sought to encourage apologies and remedial measures after medical mistakes.