That low rumbling you hear is the business lobby revving its engines for an assault on state consumer-protection laws. The corporate-funded American Tort Reform Association gave fair warning at an event in Washington on Wednesday, when it announced “a multiyear, multistate campaign to reform such laws.”
By “reform,” ATRA means water down, roll back—choose your metaphor—but it ain’t good news for plaintiffs’ lawyers who file mass suits over allegedly misleading food labels, defective cars, and the like. Whether reforming consumer statutes would be good or bad for consumers is a matter of dispute.
