BuckeyeBlog

Obviously, significant change is coming to Washington with the election of Senator Barack Obama as president and the expansion of Democrat majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. State government will experience some significant changes as well. As expected, the election did not bring much change in the Ohio Senate but the Democrats will take control of the Ohio House of Representatives for the first time since 1994. Ohio voters also overwhelmingly re-elected Justices Maureen O’Connor and Evelyn Stratton to the Ohio Supreme Court.

Change will undoubtedly bring new ideas and proposals to the forefront. As elected officials continue their work in Columbus and elsewhere, the Buckeye Institute will continue to provide insight and analysis on Ohio’s public policy developments.

A couple weeks ago, I posted here regarding the Manhattan Institute’s recent report on the improvement Ohio has made in reforming its civil liability laws. The report briefly mentions two cases in which the Ohio Supreme Court upheld recently enacted reforms of Ohio’s tort system. I discuss those two cases in more detail in the just released summer issue of the Federalist Society’s State Court Docket Watch (the article on the Ohio cases begins on page 2 under “Case in Focus”). As the Manhattan Institute’s report indicates, the recently enacted tort reforms, including placing caps on pain and suffering damages and time limits on liability, are critical if Ohio is going to be successful in making the state attractive again for investment and business activity. Interestingly, in one of the recent cases, Arbino v. Johnson v. Johnson, the portion of the decision upholding the cap on pain and suffering damages was by a 5-2 majority. Two of the justices in the majority, Justice Evelyn Lundberg Stratton and Maureen O’Connor, are up for reelection in 2008. If they are defeated and replaced by more activist justices, the court might then have a majority that would be willing to strike down the caps on damages enacted by the General Assembly. That would be a major step backward for Ohio.