Obama's Supreme Court Pick will Impact the Law for Injured Workers and Consumers

United States Supreme Court Justice, David Souter, recently announced that he will be leaving office when the court concludes its spring calendar in late June and begins its summer break. Souter, appointed by George Bush, Sr., in 1990, was expected to be a moderate conservative, but to the surprise of both parties turned out to be a moderate liberal.

President Barack Obama has now nominated as his replacement, Sonia Sotomayor, who is a federal appeals court judge in New York. Like Justice Souter, Judge Sotomayor is also a moderate liberal, and if approved by the Senate will maintain the current Court's roster of four liberals versus five conservatives. She stands to become the first Hispanic and only the third woman to sit on the nation's highest court.

While the Senate, public and press will carefully investigate Sotomayor's views about hot-button social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and the death penalty, the nominee's legal philosophy will also have an impact on the bread and butter issues that the trial lawyers at Gordon, Edelstein, Krepack, Grant, Felton & Goldstein deal with on a regular basis. Some of those issues are:

• Pre-emption. This is a doctrine supported by conservatives which takes the position that plaintiffs in state courts who are injured by dangerous products cannot bring suit against the manufacturer if the product has met with prior approval by a federal regulatory agency. Trial lawyers believe that a product that has met with such bare minimum safety requirements issued by agencies that are often controlled by the very industries they are charged with regulating is not enough. For example, cigarettes have been determined to be dangerous products in state courts even though they met with the FDA's approval for decades. The Supreme Court has ruled in both directions on pre-emption cases in recent years, and new cases testing this doctrine are expected to be heard in the near future.
• Punitive Damages. The law generally permits an injured plaintiff to seek compensation for losses that they have incurred in the form of medical bills, lost earnings, property damage, and pain and suffering. However, the law also recognizes an exception to this rule when the defendant is guilty of severe misconduct. In such cases, the plaintiff is allowed to recover additional damages to punish the defendant for their misconduct. These additional damages are known as punitive damages, and are a form of protection for consumers against future transgressions. Such damages can often amount to triple the amount of traditional compensatory damages. Over the last decade, conservative justices on the Supreme Court have sought to limit the liability of corporations for punitive damages, and the push is on from the business community to continue rolling back consumer protections in this area.
• Class Actions. Class actions are lawsuits filed on a behalf of a group so large that it would be impractical to identify them all and bring them all to court. In such cases, one or a group of individuals are certified by courts as being representative of the larger class and stand as their representatives for purposes of the case. Monies collected by the prosecuting individuals and their attorneys are then placed into a fund from which individuals who fall into the class can later apply for their portion. Class actions are usually brought in cases of large scale consumer or securities fraud. Federal courts are generally considered to be less favorable to plaintiffs in such cases than state courts. There has therefore been an effort by conservatives and the business community to limit class actions and push them into federal court, and out of the state courts where they were originally filed. The Supreme Court will rule in the coming years over the scope of federal court jurisdiction in class action cases.