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Published Mon, Apr 05, 2010 02:00 AM
Modified Mon, Apr 05, 2010 05:05 AM

Legal warming?

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Tags: news | opinion - editorial | staff editorial

How's North Carolina's climate? That's what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wanted to know.

Only, this wasn't about global warming or the weather. A newly released survey from the Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform ranks the 50 states' "lawsuit climate" for tort liability cases, important to business.

The "litigation environment" here easily passes muster, according to the survey. Overall, the state ranks 17th from the top - corporation-friendly Delaware is No. 1 - in the ranking of state liability systems. And North Carolina's position is up from 21st two years ago. We scored particularly well for the pretrial discovery process, and not so well on judges' competence and fairness.

Those latter attributes may be partly in the eye of the beholder. Plaintiffs, after all, deserve a fair shake from the courts too.

The larger point is that while some folks routinely put down North Carolina's business climate, objective measures, and more subjective ones like this survey, generally show conditions here to be mild.

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