The Washington Times reports that a federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the NAACP blaming gun manufacturers for gun violence in New York. The lawsuit wasn't dismissed because it's baseless and absurd, but rather due to a "technicality". A "technicality" is when you lose a case because of the "law".
Unfortunately, the case wasn't thrown out for any of the reasons that I would have liked. Rather,
Judge Weinstein wrote in his ruling that the NAACP proved its members suffered "relatively more harm from the nuisance created by the defendants through illegal availability of guns in New York." But, he added, the civil rights group did not "show that its harm was different in kind from that suffered by other persons in New York."The suit cost gun makers more than $10 million to defend against, and they won't be recovering that money from the NAACP. I'm not a big fan of tort reform such as many people have proposed (restricting lawsuits, limiting real damage claims, &c.) but I do think that losing plaintiffs should almost always be obligated to pay their opponents' legal costs.
The problem with retributive legal damages is that, under the current system, victory is typically based as much on technicalities as justice or fact. If you have a system in which the loser pays the winner's legal fees, the easiest tactic for any large corporation being sued by a smaller corporation is the "blizzard" -- employing enough lawyers and writing enough briefs to overwhelm the opposite side in paperwork such that they fail to respond to the arguments presented by the necessary dates. Normally, this is far too expensive for a corporation to utilize, but if their opponent is forced to repay it, it's a very viable tactic.
I'm not saying that this would always happen, simply that it makes abuses like this more realistic and would frighten many people with legitimate suits into keeping quiet for fear of losing.
Well, there could be ways around that. If a case is dismissed due to procedural issues, then the plaintiff may not be liable. For example.