Midwestern City Tops “Judicial Hellhole” List

In the annual ranking of “judicial hellholes” compiled by the American Tort Reform Association, the City of St. Louis Circuit Court edged out California as number one. ATRA was particularly impressed by three verdicts this year, totaling $197 million, in cases alleging a causal relationship between talcum powder and ovarian cancer. ATRA noted that Missouri is one of the states that has not adopted the Daubert standard for expert testimony, and blamed its acceptance of “junk science” for making the St. Louis court a magnet for consumer and product liability class actions. (The Daubert standard, based on the 1993 Supreme Court case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and some later cases, defines in general terms what constitutes acceptable claims for causation and empowers judges to enforce it.)  In the ATRA rankings, New York City’s asbestos court, Florida’s Supreme Court and South Florida, and New Jersey ranked third, fourth and fifth, and several other venues got honorable mentions. The report also includes a listing of venues that ATRA likes. In a separate Legal News Line article, plaintiffs attorneys reject the report. The “hellhole” designation itself is a PR ploy, “trumpeted each year by organizations bought and paid for by corporate interests,” according to attorney Ted Meadows, a principal at the Montgomery, Ala. firm Beasley Allen, which has represented thousands of plaintiffs against Johnson & Johnson in the so-called perineal talc cases. The Missouri Association of Trial Attorneys said the annual rating was fake news, designed “to scare state politicians into making anti-consumer changes in the law in order to make the label go away.”