Lawsuit Sanity

The matter of criminal blame for the Sept. 11 massacres in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania is becoming clearer each day. Soon America will have to wrestle with the question of monetary responsibility. Are the airlines somehow liable for the deaths on their hijacked planes and in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon? How much responsibility, if any, should the owners of the World Trade Center bear for the buildings’ collapse? What about the engineers and construction firms that built the buildings? The 286 businesses, associations and government agencies that leased space inside?

In light of the tragedy the nation just endured, some may find such questions absurd, offensive even. But such interests are common targets in traditional liability suits.

Then there are the thorny questions of how much money the victims’ families should receive. The stockbrokers and lawyers who perished in the World Trade Center were more likely than the busboys and secretaries to have had life insurance or other death benefits for their survivors. Will damage suits filed by families end up magnifying those disparities--as such cases often do--or mitigating them?

Litigating these questions will be supremely complex and, given the horror of what happened, daunting even to some of the lawyers who would naturally step in.

In a welcome break with the past, which saw a handful of lawyers ghoulishly racing to sign up clients amid the wreckage of collapsed buildings, most attorneys are abiding by the request of American Trial Lawyers Assn. President Leo V. Boyle, who has called on his members to observe a moratorium on filing attack-related lawsuits out of respect for the victims and their families. Lawyers, judges, public officials and the leaders of charitable groups could use this time to think creatively about how to fairly and efficiently direct money to all those who need it.

As part of a $15-billion airline bailout plan, Congress voted Friday to limit American and United Airlines’ liability in the disasters and to create a fund to compensate victims. Trial lawyers should work with the government and with charities to expand the compensation-fund idea, creating a similar program or programs that would combine federal money with the millions of dollars that Americans have donated to charities as a result of the Sept. 11 atrocities. They could then devise a way to fairly allocate that money.

We don’t minimize the legal hurdles to such an approach, the organizational turf battles or the well-honed American impulse to sue. But in this rare moment of unity and collective reevaluation, perhaps the nation can find the resolve to care for the survivors and honor the dead without letting the cause become a carnival of litigation.