Tort reform is back at the Mississippi Capitol

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Tort reform is back at the Mississippi Capitol.

That term is the shorthand for a yearslong, multistate campaign by business groups to reduce lawsuit verdicts. In Mississippi, it climaxed in a 2004 special legislative session in which lawmakers limited pain-and-suffering damage awards to $1 million in most lawsuits and limited such damages to $500,000 in medical malpractice cases.

In recent years, the titanic political battle had grown quiet. Republican dominance guaranteed no rollback of Mississippi’s previous changes, but there seemed to be little left on the agenda.

But business groups have something they still want — to make it harder for people to collect damages for injuries caused by a third party on business property.

In the legal world, this is called premises liability.

“It’s an easy way to get some easy money,” Ron Aldridge, executive director of the Mississippi chapter of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said of such lawsuits.

Aldridge said businesses had originally sought changes in the 2004 package, but dropped the demand in exchange for other things they wanted.

Mississippi appeals courts have already been skeptical of people suing businesses, finding at least three times since 2002 that a business wasn’t responsible for someone else’s criminal conduct. But Aldridge and others claim some judges aren’t following those decisions, and that insurers are paying up rather than risk big verdicts, driving up insurance rates.

Supporters of the bill have repeatedly said businesses have left Mississippi because of the problem, but have yet to respond to requests by The Associated Press to identify them.

Those who want a change say current law is unfair because it’s written to prohibit judges or jurors from assigning part of the fault for an action to the criminal or other third party who performed the action. The two identical versions of what’s called the Landowners Protection Act (House Bill 337 and Senate Bill 2901 ) would change that by saying jurors or judges could divide up shares of fault.

That alone is likely to be a boon to businesses, because when someone sues a business, they can argue that most of the fault belongs to the third party who assaulted someone in a parking lot. While the business has money and insurance