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Tort tales and total justice: Exploring attitudes toward everyday tort claims for workplace injuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jeb Barnes
Affiliation:
Depertment of Politican Science and International Relations, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA
Parker Hevron*
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences and Historical Studies, Texas Woman's University, Denton, Texas, USA
Elli Menounou
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, California, USA
*
Parker Hevron, Department of Social Sciences and Historical Studies, Texas Woman's University, Denton, TX, USA. Email: phevron@twu.edu

Abstract

Despite some retrenchment, the litigation state remains alive and well. All this litigation has engendered intense debates over whether increased lawsuits represent a rising tide of justice or a flood of frivolous claims. Tort law has been at the center of these debates for decades, standing at the fault line between “tort tale,” “total justice,” and “mixed” narratives about the perils and benefits of litigation. In this article, we use a survey experiment to probe attitudes toward claims for workplace injuries in light of these narratives. We find that our participants held multifaceted views. On one hand, they favored making claims over doing nothing or asking family members for help and saw lawsuits as equally appropriate as filing a government claim or hiring a lawyer to send a demand letter. On the other hand, tort tale themes cast a subtle shadow over our participants' views. When told claimants did not rush to the courts in defiance of tort tale expectations, our participants saw the lawsuit as more justified. Indeed, the more remedies exhausted prior to litigation, the more justifiable the lawsuit seemed, even though repeated denials of claims might undermine faith in their merits. The bottom line, we contend, is that attitudes toward litigation reflect not only the choice of remedy but also how remedies are used, even when the underlying claim is meritorious—a point that could be useful to practitioners and advocates as they weigh claiming options as well as litigation and public communication strategies.

Type
Articles
Copyright
© 2023 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

How to cite this article: Barnes, Jeb, Parker Hevron, and Elli Menounou. 2023. “Tort Tales and Total Justice: Exploring Attitudes toward Everyday Tort Claims for Workplace Injuries.” Law & Society Review 57(4): 508–530. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12684

References

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