TORT "REFORM" BY ANY OTHER NAME . . . The proprietors of Blog 702 were so upset by John Stossel's recent anti-lawyer column in the New York Sun (reprinted at Point of Law) that they decided to violate their own rule against what they call "partisan polemic." Here's how their long response begins:

Stossel cannily deploys the traditional opening gambit of almost all anti-tort invective: an ad hominem attack on lawyers. In these philippics, it is customary, in particular, to trot out the phrase "trial lawyers" at the first opportunity. Like so many words and phrases with double meanings, this one serves handily as a rhetorical pivot point. Its more expansive meaning ("litigators in general") helpfully maximizes the universe of lawyers toward whom the reader is invited to feel antipathy, thereby improving the odds that each reader will hit upon some particularly contemptible exemplar, drawn from personal experience, hearsay acquaintance, or some suitable work of fiction. The availability of this more expansive interpretation also helps the anti-tort rhetorician present himself as fair-minded and even-handed. It's not lawsuits he necessarily dislikes, we're invited to think, so much as litigators of all stripes. (A simple matter of taste, perhaps, but who could really argue?) After the reader has assented to the truism that litigators are a generally shifty and unpleasant crowd, the meaning of the phrase can segue to the narrower category actually in the anti-tort rhetorician's crosshairs: litigators who represent plaintiffs.

For more polemic, see the full post. It also includes a good point about the term tort reform--

We nearly said "tort reform," but we stopped ourselves, for two reasons. First of all, Stossel's piece shows no interest in "reforming" anything. It simply complains. But secondly, we've come to the view that even scare-quotes do not sufficiently confront the Orwellian qualities of this phrase. In our view, the word "reform" simply does not capture the actual agenda of most self-identified "tort reformers," which is to "reform" the tort system by so radically shrinking its field of operation as to effect its de facto abolition, save perhaps in cases of battery and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. From now on, we plan to refer to that agenda forthrightly as the "anti-tort" position.

So tort reform becomes the anti-tort position. Does it work? The proposal has some merit, but it's hard to talk about those who espouse the position without resorting to anti-torters, which is confusing. What other options are there? Some like the term tort deform, which suggests tort deformers, but those terms seem too flip for serious discourse. Are there other workable ideas? I'm opening the floor to suggestions.