Lessons from "Erin Brockovich"

That is where the roles of Bush, Starr, the Federalist Society and Congress become pertinent, even though the director and screenwriter didn't include them. Bush (along with his father, the former president) has pushed hard to curtail such litigation, on the grounds that punitive-damages awards are onerous to business and that frivolous lawsuits are clogging the courts. As solicitor general in the Bush administration, and later as a corporate appeals lawyer specializing in tort cases, Starr has often made the same arguments, echoing his friends in the Federalist Society and their allies on Capitol Hill.

For reasons best known to them -- but just possibly having to do with the enormous sums of money flowing into their campaign and personal accounts from major corporate defendants -- these conservative legal philosophers apparently believe that ordinary Americans ought to be defenseless against corporate depredations of the kind chronicled in "Erin Brockovich." First, they gutted the capacity of the federally funded Legal Services Corp. to bring class-action lawsuits against corporate malefactors on behalf of clients too poor to hire their own attorneys. Then they weakened enforcement of consumer, workplace safety and environmental statutes by federal agencies. And finally, they have tried to strip away the protections provided by tort laws, under which attorneys of the sort played by Albert Finney and Peter Coyote in this movie seek justice for injured plaintiffs -- and share in the proceeds only if they win.

The punitive damages awarded in tort lawsuits do more than occasionally enrich such lawyers and their clients. The loss of millions or even billions because of faulty products and polluting plants is a potent method of encouraging better corporate citizenship. (It has sometimes occurred to me that the most effective application of the death penalty would be to deter the worst kinds of corporate misbehavior, but that's a subject for another column.)

Hollywood studios invariably take liberties with the facts whenever they transform nonfiction into a motion picture. The real Brockovich may bear no resemblance to her filmic self, for example, and the facts of the case may differ significantly from the tale told on screen. But in one important respect, this morality play nevertheless rings true: the imbalance of power between individual citizens who live from one check to the next and a corporate mammoth worth billions.

By depriving citizens of the means to redress their grievances against powerful corporations in court, tort reform threatens to render meaningless our constitutional guarantee of equality before the law. It is the fulfillment of that guarantee that makes "Erin Brockovich" so inspiring to the audiences that loudly applaud its heroine's triumph as the credits begin to roll.

On second thought, maybe George W. should just skip Soderbergh's little masterpiece. What uplifts the rest of us might leave him feeling a bit depressed.

• View blog reactions