Dallas Personal Injury Attorney Blog

Every day we read in the paper about some lawsuit or another. Any conceivable kind of dispute can wind up in America's civil courts. After all, that's what they are there for: to settle disputes between citizens in a nonviolent manner and to ensure that any citizen can seek justice, even if his opponent is rich and powerful. I think we can all agree that while the concept is good, sometimes the process isn't pretty, and sometimes the results we read about in the paper make us scratch our heads and wonder how the jury in a particular case reached the result it did. Having been involved in several well-publicized cases, I can assure anyone that the reports that made it into the paper about those cases bore little resemblance to the case I was handling - but that isn't the topic of this article.

Lost in all the squabbling about who is getting the worst end of the stick at the courthouse is the fact that our civil legal system is almost entirely based on "common law". "Common law" is law that comes entirely from the people - you and me - and not from any statute, ordinance, code or rule passed by the government.

With few exceptions, when you sue someone in the civil courts in this country, there are no statutes or codes that will decide whether you are right or the defendant is right. A jury will make that determination based on what they think is fair. The right to sue is not contained in a statute: it simply exists as a right that is "common" to all of us and is guaranteed by the United States and Texas constitutions.

In a jury trial, the judge is basically a referee: he decides if there is enough of a case to be heard by a jury, what evidence can be heard by the jury (if there is a dispute about that), and various other procedural matters. Except in rare circumstances, the judge does not decide the case. People like you and me, sitting on the jury, decide the case. Judges are limited in their power to contradict the jury's verdict, since our system is based on the principle that our citizens should have the right and the duty to decide what a just result will be in any particular case.

What a person can sue another person for, and the amount that can be recovered, has been changing as the average citizens' attitudes have changed over the centuries. Our civil law is the product of literally hundreds of thousands of jury verdicts over two hundred years in which people like you and me determined what was right.

The concept that 12 ordinary people can do a good job of finding a just result in any kind of dispute is still revolutionary: In most nations, if you have a dispute with the government or a powerful corporation, you lose, period. Many countries with highly organized court systems have no provision for a man to sue for personal injury, or breach of contract. Others let every dispute be investigated, prosecuted and decided by the same people, all appointed by the government. Think about the politician you like the most: do you really trust him to investigate, prosecute and decide your case against someone he golfs with, or the corporation who contributed money to his campaign?

There is something fundamentally amazing - and really, really good - about the idea that in this country, we trust each other to decide disputes, and that twelve of our citizens sitting on a jury can decide that a plaintiff's claim is silly, or can change the way a major corporation does business. Our citizens decide what the law is, and they do it thousands of times a day sitting on juries deciding disputes ranging from minor fender-benders to multi-million dollar fraud suits. Our law is "common" to all of us - young or old, black or white, rich or poor. We're used to our system here, and we like to complain about it, but I haven't heard of anything better anywhere else. It is one of the fundamental strengths and requirements of a true democracy that the people decide legal disputes - not the government, not the wealthy, but you, and me, and our neighbors.

The Founding Fathers thought this concept was so important that they put it in the Declaration of Independence and in three places in the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers of Texas thought it was so important that they put it in the Texas Constitution in two places. And they weren't wrong: today, as was the case 226 years ago, the evidence of what happens when the rich and powerful think they can make their own rules is obvious. In this country, the richest and most powerful in the history of the world, we still have law which is "common" to all of us - meaning we all share in it, we all have a duty to help create it, and it applies to all of us. Many, many rich and powerful people and corporations hate that idea, because it means that they may have to answer to the rest of us when they make the mistake of thinking our laws don't (or shouldn't) apply to them. We are all safer, and more free, because they are wrong, and our Founding Fathers were right.