Once again, the Manhattan Institute and its Trial Lawyers, Inc. series set the gold standard for reporting the ground-truth about legal systems in the states.

In a new update, “Judging Ohio,” Manhattan manages to tell a legal reform saga in concise terms.

In 1999, the Ohio State Supreme Court bowed to the trial bar in a way that scandalized the legal world. It used an extraordinary writ of mandamus to review the legislature’s legal reforms, without an appeal or even a controversy to base it on. By a bare majority, the court then voided these reforms.

Outraged, Ohio voters elected a more reform-friendly court.

Democracy has also led to the forced resignation of a trial lawyer-friendly AG caught in a salacious scandal. The legislature has since responded to the will of the voters by limiting the size of bonds for defendants on appeal, putting limits and caps on medical-malpractice suits, limiting punitive damages, setting limits on obesity lawsuits, enacting an approach to asbestos lawsuits that has become a national model, and mandating that juries should know whether car-crash plaintiffs wore their seatbelts.

Are you starting to see why trial lawyers don’t like the idea of judicial elections?