The American Association for Justice has produced a new report, exposing the U.S. Chamber's hypocrisy re litigation and access to the courts:
Do As I Say, Not As I Sue: Exposing the Lawsuit-Happy Hypocrites of U.S. Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform
The Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), an arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has the sole mission of restricting the ability of individuals harmed by negligent corporations to access the civil justice system. According to the multinational corporations that finance ILR, American businesses are hindered by too many lawsuits. Yet these same corporations show no hesitation in liberally using the courthouse themselves.
Caterpillar for instance, one of ILR’s board members, sued Disney because it felt the depiction of bulldozers in the straight-to-video movie George of the Jungle 2 was overly villainous. FedEx, another stalwart ILR board member, took a “stand for justice” by suing a man for making a chair out of FedEx boxes. And Johnson & Johnson used the civil justice system to take on a most unlikely foe – the Red Cross.
However silly these lawsuits may sound, they share one common theme: the company filing the lawsuit had the Constitutional right to do so. What makes their actions shameful and hypocritical is that these companies are members of ILR’s board for the sole purpose of denying Americans this same right, especially when severely harmed or killed by the companies’ products and services.
The .pdf of the report is here.
Also worth reading:
The Chamber Litigation Machine: How the Chamber Uses Lawsuits to Keep Americans Out of Court
For years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has led the charge to undermine and destroy America’s civil justice system. The Chamber has spent hundreds of millions of dollars financing efforts to close the courthouse doors to American consumers through massive lobbying campaigns, advertising and bankrolling anti-consumer political candidates. It has its own multi- million dollar affiliate, the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), whose sole mission is to restrict the ability of individuals harmed by negligent corporations to file suit.
Yet ironically, the Chamber is also one of the most aggressive litigators in Washington, D.C., appearing in hundreds of lawsuits a year. The Chamber has its own litigation arm, the National Chamber Litigation Center (NCLC), which both files its own lawsuits and enters into the lawsuits of others more than 130 times a year.
The Chamber’s surfeit of litigation has come on behalf of the same large multinational corporations that provide the organization with hundreds of millions of dollars in tax deductible membership dues. The boards of the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform and National Chamber Litigation Center are composed entirely of large, multinational corporations that want to undermine and eliminate America’s civil justice system so they won’t be held accountable for their misconduct (see appendix for full list).
This needs to be pointed out more often.