Implications of Tort Reform

In the case of one tobacco case I covered in 1988, this was a case called Cipollone in Newark, New Jersey. The only way that we could get to see what the tobacco companies knew and when they knew it was to be in the courtroom when these documents were put into evidence -- depositions and so forth. And without trial lawyers, whatever abuses some of them commit, how would these documents have come out? They are a check and balance on corporate power -- an opportunity for the public to learn via the press, when the press does its job, of the abuses that corporations so often perpetrate.