How many Americans would line up to buy a car that qualifies for car-pool lines, costs $17,000, and gets 46 miles-to-the-gallon? Volkswagen wanted to sell such a car in America. So why didn’t it? VW’s “green machine” would have run on three wheels. And in a lawsuit-crazy country, any anomaly is sure to be seized upon by ambulance-chasing trial lawyers as evidence of a “defect.” After surveying the dysfunctional civil justice scene in America, VW decided it could not afford to sell this car in our market.

This is just one way we Americans harm ourselves by having a global reputation of living in a country that is a trial lawyer’s paradise. Manufacturers and investors can easily be discouraged by the legal climates of a country. The same holds true for states. Some are better for investment than others. And the ultimate impact is felt not in the diversity of products, but in the growth of jobs, or lack thereof.

In a must read article, former Michigan Governor (and currently National Association of Manufacturers president) John Engler joins Lawrence McQuillan, economist with the venerable Pacific Research Institute, to bring together incontrovertible evidence that states with reformed systems of civil justice create jobs—and those with lousy systems of civil justice lose jobs.

They cite Lisa Kimmel, a UC Berkeley economist, who found that states that adopted six common tort reforms between 1970 and 1997 enjoyed higher job growth, an average of 1 percent overall. “To put this in perspective,” Engler and McQuillan write, “one of these tort reforms in California would create more than 152,000 jobs; more than 87,000 jobs in New York, and more than 82,000 jobs in Florida.”

PRI follows up with a detailed report from the U.S. Tort Liability Index, which breaks states into tort “sinners,” “salvageables” and “saints.” Read the study to find out where your state ranks.