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Tort law refers to the system of laws governing civil wrongdoing, which is a bedrock governmental function and entails hundreds of thousands of lawsuits annually. These suits range from individual disputes stemming from car crashes, medical errors, or slip-and-fall accidents, to complex public health issues like the fallout from artificial intelligence and social media.Sensationalized accounts of these encounters with the law are part of a broader post-truth politics and the ongoing culture wars in contemporary Americanpolitics. Conservative rhetoric, for example, exaggerates the prevalence of frivolous claims, while liberal talking pointsdescribe tort as holding reckless corporations accountable.
In this book, the authors map these debates onto the mythology of rugged American individualism, which privileges both stoic self-reliance and standing up to powerful interests. They explore attitudes towards claimants and claims in three policy areas: medical malpractice, auto collisions, and premises liability. The Rugged Litigant deftly weaves a story of complex and layered preferences that defy conventional accounts of culture wars, and ultimately, display a shocking degree of consensus across ideologies: people believe that litigation should be an option - when used as a last resort. These findings offer a novel roadmap for countering the seemingly intractable polarization in today's politics.
"The Rugged Litigant is an important, empirically grounded account of how ordinary Americans continue to embrace litigation to speak truth to power in the 'post-truth' era. Essential reading for jury consultants, trial lawyers, civil justice scholars, and all those seeking to understand how the traditional American values of 'grit' and 'gumption' shape Americans' perceptions of the tort system—in sometimes surprising ways."—Anne Bloom, University of California, Berkeley School of Law