Keep in mind that the index terms the "best" or most highly ranked states as those that have most limited and restricted their civil justice system to victims.

I looked at the states that the index ranks as the "top ten". These are the states that it sees as being the best "reformers," or in other words having the most restrictive civil justice system. In practice, this means that they are the states that have enacted the most anti-civil justice legislation. I then looked at the states that the index ranked as the worst ten, or in other words, the states with the most robust and accessible civil justice systems.

The results once again demonstrate why you should ignore this index.

The ten states that the index ranked in its top ten "tort reform" states had an average per capita personal income that was $4,021 less than the states that the index listed as the ten worst "reformers." In the index's top ten "tort reform" states the average per capita income is $32,836 while in the index's worst ten it is $36,857. Indeed, Connecticut, the state with the highest per capita income of all states, was ranked by the liability index as #44.

If the argument being put forward by the report is that a robust civil justice system hurts corporations, which hurts the state's economy and reduces jobs, which in turn hurts the employees, why do the states that the index describes as the vanguard of tort reform on average make $4021 less than the "worst" ten?

Clearly, an interest in helping the average working man or woman maintain or increase their income is not the goal of the authors of the index or the anti-civil justice movement.

If it was, the most highly ranked states would correlate more highly with the actual income of the people who lived there.

Whatever your view of lawyers, the civil justice system, corporations, or anything, I think that we can all agree that we would prefer to have $4021 dollars more in income a year than - to not. If you agree, I would advise that you move to one of the index's ten "worst" states as soon as possible, before everybody else gets the word.

Some might say that a better measure of real living conditions is per capita gross state product. Even if you use this number, the "best" highest ranked tort reform states on average have $1247 less than the "worst." GSP also measures the overall economic output of the state, not the amount of income that individuals in that state actually gain from said output.

It is disappointing to me that I didn't notice this additional reason why you should ignore the index in my first read of it, and have now forced you to read a second entire blog post about why you can ignore something that you probably haven't even read because of my first post.

However, this was such a glaring and fundamental reason that I had to post about it again.

My only hope is that reading my both of my posts on this was far less horrible than reading an 89 page index that - as I think I've mentioned before - you should feel free to ignore.

To read a recently released report on the Tillinghast data by the Center for Justice and Democracy click here.

If you or your organization is interested in learning more about or working on these types of civil justice issues, please feel free to contact me at cdugger@drummajorinstitute.org.

Cyrus Dugger
Senior Fellow in Civil Justice
Drum Major Institute for Public Policy