Few of the inconsistencies in Mississippi's image as a fortress of conservatism glare more brightly than its reputation as the mother lode for civil lawsuit plaintiffs and the attorneys who seek - and win - huge damage awards in the state's court system.
That reputation - and the real-life cases, trials, and damages awarded - has created an uncivil war within the legal community and between medical and corporate defendants and plaintiffs' attorneys, personified in the Mississippi Trial Lawyers Association.
Hugely successful lawsuits - and their organic connection to soaringly expensive and even unavailable physicians' malpractice insurance coverage - landed Mississippi on a list of 12 crisis states identified by the American Medical Association.
The crisis becomes local trouble when hometown doctors who deliver babies close offices because they cannot afford insurance to adequately cover the assessed risk associated with practicing in Mississippi. It affects thousands of patients in a clinic's medical files when its doctors stop admitting patients to local hospitals because they cannot afford and refuse to accept the risk of lawsuits. Families worry when major hospitals with splendid credentials and records suddenly become woefully understaffed or unstaffed in critical specialties - once taken for granted in most of Mississippi's major medical centers.
Liability for manufacturers and other businesses becomes a broader issue of jobs for Mississippians when a stalwart of employment and growth like Lane Furniture Industries says it will not take the risk of additional expansions in Mississippi unless limits and balance become part of the civil justice system.
A four-day series of articles and editorials that started in Sunday's Daily Journal examines those, and other, issues: the views of plaintiffs whose claims have been validated by jury action, the confidence of plaintiffs' attorneys who admit to no imbalance in the system, and urgent appeals from the state's larger business community for favorable reforms.
At issue is not the right to sue for alleged damages, and certainly not the right to be awarded monetary damages when malpractice or negligence is proven. The issues are redefinitions of balance and excess, and whether or not a tilted judicial system and the judiciary itself is at the heart of the debate.
Mississippi judicial practice clearly has allowed - in some counties - the establishment of a flourishing atmosphere for the filing of damage lawsuits related to the venue by the thinnest of legal threads, but sought for the measurable propensity of jurors to award huge sums, especially in punitive damages.
Even-keeled attorneys whose practice includes both corporate clients and plaintiffs say shopping for juries, trials held far from the place of alleged damage, judicial decisions about seeking punitive damages, and joinder of many plaintiffs in single lawsuits defies the intent of the rules of practice written and adopted by the Mississippi Supreme Court. The high court itself, some lawyers and many defendants assert, is itself at the core of the debate.
Changes in the court could change the climate, and that depends directly on electoral politics - including one major race this year.
The preponderance of power for change rests with the Legislature, whose name is heard less in the debate than any other major player. However, the fact of physicians closing practices and leaving the state has compelled that frequently reluctant body to take up the situation in a special committee. Its report is due next month, and Gov. Ronnie Musgrove has promised to call a special session. The governor, a former plaintiffs' attorney, makes no promises about outcomes, but he has a proposal about a state insurance pool.
In truth, the power to move reform legislation resides mostly within the two chambers. Speaker Tim Ford of Baldwyn is the son of a physician who practiced for decades in the small town straddling the Lee and Prentiss County lines. Speaker Ford is an attorney and an excellent politician. If he wants significant reforms to pass the House, few doubt his ability to thread all the needles necessary to make the whole fabric.
The Senate is another matter because its leadership structure focuses less on one person - Lt. Gov. Amy Tuck - and more on a team of lawmakers not particularly friendly to the voices backing reforms.
However, the outcry and the unfolding story of physicians closing shop and ordinary people - also known in election years as voters - being harmed by the situation, casts an intensifying, hot light on what legislators may do and could do and should do to balance the scales of justice.
