“Tort Reform” Conference

I may have posted about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again — Northwestern is hosting a conference this Friday on “Litigation and Tort Reform.”

“Tort reform” has been a rallying cry of the business community for over 25 years, with acrimonious political battles waged with trial lawyers in almost every state capital. But very little is known about the impact of tort reforms. Are tort reforms achieving their goals of reducing the burden of litigation? Do tort reforms have unintended consequences?

Scholars at Northwestern University are among the nation’s leaders in empirically studying the impacts of tort reforms. The goal of this conference is to explore the significance of the cutting-edge research that scholars from Northwestern and other leading universities are undertaking. In order to help bridge the gap from academia to the practical consequences of this research, leading attorneys and protagonists in the public policy arena will critique this important work in a dynamic format designed to sharpen our understanding of the consequences of tort reform.