Business & Economics

A national business group has given its verdict on New Jersey’s legal climate, and it’s not good. A report released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a Washington, D.C.-based business lobby group, placed New Jersey 35th in a national survey of lawyers that judged state court systems on whether ...

WASHINGTON – West Virginia again is last in a study ranking states’ court systems. For the third consecutive year, the Mountain State is ranked 50th in the 2008 State Liability Systems Ranking Study, which was released Wednesday by the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. The study, conducted by Harris ...

Once again, the debate over West Virginia’s rankings in the legal climate is raging, inspired by a fresh study performed for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce putting the state dead last. Teresa Toriseva, head of the West Virginia Association for Justice, an organization of trial lawyers, ridiculed the Harris poll ...

Editor, Daily News: Less than two weeks remain in the 2008 Florida legislative session and it appears that common-sense legal reform will not be addressed. Unfortunately, Florida’s budget crisis has commanded the attention of our legislators, and important legal reforms like “expert witnesses” and “emergency health-care providers” will probably not ...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform on Wednesday is releasing its 2008 Lawsuit Climate report, an annual exercise in which the ILR surveys in-house counsels on their perceptions of how reasonable and balanced each state’s tort liability system is. (The 2007 survey is available here.) It’s one ...

Though commissioner (and net neutrality opponent) Robert McDowell expressed disappointment over Comcast’s absence, the company understandably kept its distance from what quickly deteriorated into a kangaroo court. With 70 percent of the panelists, and 100 percent of the public comments supporting strict regulations and penalties, it appears that the verdict ...

There’s troubling legislation in Sacramento to open the state’s lucrative public employee retirement system to private employees. Unfortunately, there’s little opposition, which may make the scheme inevitable. As with so many well-intended government ideas, Assembly Bill 2940 ostensibly would solve a problem. But as is also so often the case, ...

As Americans stretched to pay the tax man this week, California Assemblyman Charles Calderon (D-Montebello) was working on the sly to institute a new digital tax. Such a move is not only short-sighted, but also could seriously harm the state’s competitiveness. It’s no secret that the digital economy is a ...

That’s the conclusion reached by a new study from the Pacific Research Institute, a San Francisco think tank that advocates for free-market policy solutions. The 2008 U.S. Tort Liability Index found that North Carolina was the third best state in the country in terms of having relatively low tort costs ...