WHAT: On Tuesday morning, I picked up a color printout of a 26-page report by Kia Franklin, the Civil Justice Fellow of the Drum Major Institute . The report is Election '08: A Pro-Civil Justice Presidential Platform . I saw it at the breakfast forum about the 'greening' of the ports of Los Angeles. While Mayor Villaraigosa was suppposed to have attended, one of his deputies -- Sean Arian -- from the LA economic development agency was an apt substitute.
SO WHAT: I highly recommend the report foremost because the tone is accessible and not overly-academic nor legalese. The look is crisp. And the format is tight.
The Pro-Civil Justice Platform uplifts the legal norms that dictate public life. For example, the reality of the legal system, the legal practices determining not only medical malpractice but the reality inside hospitals and other public health institutions. Franklin explains how perpetual understaffing in hospitals results in poor working conditions. As a result,
the average patient should expect to be teh victim of at least one medication each day .
Two sections that best illustrated the fundamental changes needed in the legal systems are:
1) on Medical Malpractice Reform -- how all the noise about 'tort reform' misses the larger problem facing the medical industry and medical practice as it operates in the USA. As
Franklin states, the medical priority ought to be patient safety. Not the priorities of an HMO.
2) on Confidentiality Agreements -- where corporations and their legal teams require plaintiffs in civil cases to agree to confidentiality in a settlement. As a result, corporate lawbreaking can go undetected for years and decades. The first civil case on the toxic effects of asbestos was in 1933. It wasn't until the year of my birth FORTY-FIVE YEARS LATER that another case was filed against asbestos manufacturers and employers who subjected workers to asbestos.
NOW WHAT:
As brilliant as Kia Franklin's report is, the question I am left with is:
... how will her research, analysis and policy recommendations reach the desks of Obama's inner circles of policy advisors?
There must be a clarion call for a coherent 10-Point Program for the Federal Government in 2009. Franklins' report is a far-reaching plan putting forth how Congress and the White House must destroy and rebuild structural failures in the justice and legal systems.