Did you know that if you found out your drinking water was contaminated with carcinogens and you joined a class action lawsuit against the polluter, you’d be very unlikely to win damages unless you could prove you had cancer that was caused by the water?
That’s the implication of a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court case, TransUnion LLC vs. Ramirez, which ruled that plaintiffs in class action suits can only win if they prove concrete harm, not potential or future harms. The topic, along with many other surprising facts about the American legal system, was raised recently during a lively lunch-and-learn event at the Zicklin School of Business called “Access to Justice: A Panel Discussion on Civil Litigation Reform.”
Introduced by Baruch College’s president, David Wu, and moderated by Zicklin faculty members Valerie Watnick and Robert Wagner (professor and chair and associate professor, respectively, of the Department of Law), the discussion was sponsored by the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice, founded by Zicklin alumnus Francis J. Greenburger (BBA, ’74).
Greenburger, a real estate developer and literary agent, told the audience he became interested in civil litigation reform after his company hired an architectural firm to design a project, only to find out too late that the architect had followed the U.S. Building Code instead of the stricter New York City code, which would take precedence in New York City. Forced to rework the project, Greenburger’s company sued and eventually won, but lost so much time and money in the process that they didn’t recover the full cost of the damages.
Some of his employees, Greenburger added, spent up to two weeks in examinations before trial, a.k.a. meetings with lawyers during the discovery phase, engaged in processes which were expensive and inefficient. Because of the enormous costs involved, “much of our legal system has become weaponized,” he concluded. Personally, he advocates for “limited inquiry and limited court time, to keep costs down.”
Greenburger was joined on the panel by Mark Cuker, an environmental litigation attorney who represented the plaintiffs in the infamous Toms River, NJ, Superfund case (where childhood cancers rose because of polluted groundwater); and Leah Nicholls, a civil litigator and the director of the Access to Justice Project at Public Justice, a Washington D.C. nonprofit.
Other information offered in the discussion included the following facts:
- New York City litigators in business cases are typically paid $600 to $2,000 per hour
- Attorneys sometimes represent lawsuits on contingency especially environmental cases, meaning they don’t get paid if they lose (and therefore won’t take on cases with no merit)
- Contrary to widespread opinion that many lawsuits are frivolous, more than 80 percent of meritorious medical cases are never brought.
At the end of the talk, a Zicklin student asked panelists for reading recommendations, and received the following list:
- From Nicholls: The Color of Law (on redlining) and An American Marriage (on black male incarceration)
- From Cuker: The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic and A Civil Action (about a 1980s water contamination case in Massachusetts)
- From Greenburger: Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Conviction, by bestselling legal thriller writer John Grisham
For more information about the Greenburger Center for Social and Criminal Justice, visit https://greenburgercenter.org/
