You’re a personal injury victim, maybe here in San Francisco, or the Bay Area, or wherever.   Here is how it happened: let’s say you were sitting at a red light, waiting for it to turn green, and you’re hit from behind, hard, real hard.  Some guy in a delivery truck or maybe even a Prius and his brakes didn’t work was messing with his iPhone when he should have been driving and now you are in the hurt-locker.

You spend several days in the hospital, have back surgery, end up going through a ton a different medications before you find a way to control the pain in your back.  And by the way, your professional life, personal life, not to mention your financial life, have gone to hell-in-a-hand-basket because someone was in a hurry or was doing something they shouldn’t have been doing when they should have been keeping their eyes on the road.

And now to make matter worse – the other guy’s insurance is giving you the run-around and refuses to simply pay your medical bills and lost wages, which by the way are about to bankrupt you – literally.

So, you come to me: a San Francisco Personal Injury Attorney.  I represent folks like you in the Bay Area in car accidents, trucking accidents, product liability matters – you get the picture.  We go to work – a deposition here a deposition there and clippidy-cloppidy we’re in front of a jury.

But wait a minute.  There are a whole lot of folks out there – tort-reformers – that believe you can cure most of the country’s ills if we just cap all pain and suffering damages.  Did I fail to mention in the scenario above that you don’t make a whole lot of money.  In fact, due to the economy you are fairly underemployed for your skills and so you really don’t have much in the way of economic damages beyond your medical bills.

So, your damages consists primarily of past medical expenses and your pain and suffering and emotional distress.  But remember under the tort-reformers’ rule the latter is capped, cut off, arbitrarily.

Now, the scenario I described is not the law currently in California (unless it’s a medical malpractice case).  But it’s how a lot of very passionate folks would like it to be.  The way this is started is with damage caps in medical malpractice cases and then they work to expand such caps to all cases.  Unfortunately, a number of states have adopted these caps in medical malpractice cases including California.

But they are wrong – these caps limit ordinary citizens’ access to justice and they deprive all of us of the right to a jury trial.  And according to the Illinois Supreme Court yesterday they violate that state’s separation of powers under their state constitution and thus the caps were struck down as unconstitutional.

The folks over at the WSJ’s Law Blog thought that not many were paying attention to this case with so many product liability issues ruling the day.  But some of us were.

The case is Abigaile Lebron, a Minor et al v. Gottlieb Memorial Hospital.