I like the idea of loser pays for certain classes of abuse but you need some mechanism to counter the innate tendency to deter the non-rich from filing a lawsuit in all but the most certain of cases. Some sort of a good faith exemption would be nice but it'd have to be very carefully constructed.
This becomes particularly obvious when you look at things which aren't extremely clear-cut cases. Say the company across the street is polluting. With a remotely-competent regulatory system, you can contact the local government and they [hopefully] have funding to investigate. With a lawsuit-driven system, you'd have to be prepared to pay for all of that out of pocket while trying to demonstrate direct losses for something which is rarely be more precise than a statistical likelihood in the hope that you'll eventually be compensated.
With loser pays, you now have the risk of having to pick up the tab for the company's top-notch legal team, too, which gives them powerful leverage to push you towards a settlement if the case isn't going 100% your way – after all, it's only your house that's on the line. If the company loses, it's not like the CEO has to pay for it personally.
The reason why we have the regulatory agencies we have is because we've already proven that the “do whatever you want and sue if it goes wrong” approach doesn't work well. The better question to debate is how to make those regulators more effective and responsive
This becomes particularly obvious when you look at things which aren't extremely clear-cut cases. Say the company across the street is polluting. With a remotely-competent regulatory system, you can contact the local government and they [hopefully] have funding to investigate. With a lawsuit-driven system, you'd have to be prepared to pay for all of that out of pocket while trying to demonstrate direct losses for something which is rarely be more precise than a statistical likelihood in the hope that you'll eventually be compensated.
With loser pays, you now have the risk of having to pick up the tab for the company's top-notch legal team, too, which gives them powerful leverage to push you towards a settlement if the case isn't going 100% your way – after all, it's only your house that's on the line. If the company loses, it's not like the CEO has to pay for it personally.
The reason why we have the regulatory agencies we have is because we've already proven that the “do whatever you want and sue if it goes wrong” approach doesn't work well. The better question to debate is how to make those regulators more effective and responsive