Hans F. Sennholz’s “Ruinous Litigation” is a short policy essay, originally a January 1996 Notes piece, examining the spread of liability suits through American professional and commercial life. Its main thesis is that malpractice, product-liability, and insurance crises are symptoms of a deeper entitlement culture: when political claims replace private responsibility, ordinary relations become adversarial and insurable risks multiply. The opening anecdote, a dismissed malpractice suit against a church after pastoral counseling preceded suicide, sets up the argument that even acts of counsel or service are being drawn into litigation.
Everyone, it seems, is suing. Workers are bringing suits against employers, customers against businessmen, tenants against landlords, clients against architects, engineers, and attorneys, patients against their doctors, students against their teachers. In just six years federal product-liability suits alone have more than doubled, now exceeding 10,000 every year. Last year, even the weather bureau was sued for having failed to predict a storm.
Sennholz first establishes breadth, not doctrine. His catalogue turns litigation into a social fact crossing employment, business, housing, education, medicine, and government. Insurance is the practical index of this fact: rising premiums and unavailable policies translate legal uncertainty into general cost. The most developed example is medicine, where suits change conduct before any verdict.
Consequently, doctors practice “defensive medicine,” spending some $15 billion to $30 billion on lab tests and x-rays that are unneeded but deemed necessary for possible malpractice suits.
For Sennholz, defensive medicine is not merely wasteful testing; it is evidence that liability expectations reorganize professional judgment. Doctors leave obstetrics, abandon urban practice, retire, or choose safer specialties, so patients inherit both cost and scarcity. The essay then makes an important turn: it refuses to blame one visible class for the crisis.
It is futile to search for a scapegoat for this liability and insurance dilemma. It is fruitless to blame patients for turning into “adversaries” eager to sue. The people are not out “to get” their doctors.
This move distinguishes the essay from a simple anti-lawyer polemic. Patients, attorneys, doctors, insurers, and firms are actors inside a changed moral and institutional order. Sennholz asks what has made them confrontational. His answer is ideological: Americans have come to understand rights as enforceable claims to transfers, and government as regulator and provider of last resort. In health care this creates “legal medicine,” a field ordered by public rules, employer obligations, and patients’ rights.
Legal medicine with its myriad of rules and regulations about entitlement affords countless opportunities for litigation.
The phrase names his core conceptual move. Medicine is no longer only a relationship of healer and patient, or contract and service; it is saturated by legal entitlements. Each asserted right produces a possible injury, a claimant, a defendant, and an insurer. Sennholz connects the same logic to the wider contrast between “human rights” and “property rights,” arguing that political rights become mechanisms for taking from some to benefit others.
The entitlement ideology is a transfer and redistribution ideology that is relentlessly pressing its case in the halls of politics and the courts of law. It is confrontational in design and intent, seeking to benefit some people at the expense of others.
The essay’s structure is escalatory: anecdote, statistical panorama, insurance shock, medical distortion, rejection of scapegoats, and political diagnosis. Its relevance lies in linking tort escalation to health-care inflation, risk avoidance, professional withdrawal, and the adversarial style of welfare-state politics. Sennholz offers no technical litigation reform; the implied remedy is a restoration of responsibility, property, contract, and voluntary exchange against entitlement claims. The closing warning broadens malpractice into a question about the survival of free institutions.
The malpractice crisis that is touching the quick of the professions and the product-liability crisis that is crippling several industries reveal a moral crisis that is putting all free societies in jeopardy.
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