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SPEAKER: There are, of course, lots of perceptions about lawyers and about the law. And our current-- the Republican Party in Congress is feeding into some of them, the notion that settlements are too high, personal damages are far too high. And so now, there are all these attempts to limit frivolous cases as well as amounts of money. In this whole area of tort reform, an area that you know a lot about, what's your feeling about these concerns and some of the moves that Congress has made to limit them.

ROBBINS: A very wonderful professor, Tom Lambert, Suffolk Law School in Boston, once said he scoffs at wounds who has himself never borne a scar. And it's kind of interesting to have as a client a doctor or a nurse who comes to you to be helped because they were rear-ended and claim they have a whiplash. And they have all the symptoms that they know about that their patients complain of. And they, of all people, are most likely to color it, to make something dramatic about it.

And those are the kinds of cases that lawyers who are good practitioners say, thanks, but no thanks. I can't represent you. Putting limits upon pain and suffering is putting a person in a position where they're considered to be a fungible entity. Your threshold of pain is different than mine. My threshold of pain is different than everybody else's.

We're all unique. We're not fungible. And I don't think that the law was ever intended to deny a person a full remedy. Every Constitution of every state and the federal Constitution says there shall be a remedy for every wrong. That's why a person is entitled to a day in court if they can afford it today.

If you did away with the civil rules of discovery and you required people to go into court with their recollections, there would be less fabrication. But after they've gone through untold numbers of depositions, answering untold numbers of interrogatories, having people coach them on how to answer things, we don't have facts anymore in courtrooms. We have fiction. And it's unfortunate because it is eroding the public's respect for the law.

And the doctors suffer from that as well, because there are doctors who are the best that money can buy as experts and make a profession of being it. There's a bank of doctors that you can go to that will testify for so much an hour.

SPEAKER: Right, the whole notion of expert witnesses, I mean, I there are expert witnesses in all fields now, I understand.

ROBBINS: Of course. In every field and advertise.

SPEAKER: Yeah, people make a living. People make a living.

ROBBINS: Well, that is a living. It's a wonderful living.

SPEAKER: Tell me some of your-- if not the greatest cases, maybe the greatest cases that you've tried, but maybe the ones that you remember most fondly, remember that-- are most important to you as you leave a legacy of all these years in the law.

ROBBINS: We have a law on the books. It's known as the Lord Campbell law. In the ancient law, when a person died, they died with all of the wrongs that were against them. And they just died, and nobody could bring an action against them. You couldn't bring an action on their behalf. Nothing survived.

Lord Campbell's Act came out of England. And most of our common law came from England. And the Lord Campbell Act was known as the Wrongful Death Act. Now, the Wrongful Death Act, when I graduated from law school, the most that you could receive for wrongful death, and no matter how much damage there was out of it, was $7,500.

I felt that was very unfair, and just as I felt that many of the workers' compensation awards were very unfair, just like I thought when there was a divorce and a judge would allow a wife who was a hard working wife and raise kids for a husband who was earning $50 a week, which was a grand sum in those days-- the judge would give the wife $5 a week as alimony. And these were all, in my opinion, unfair.

And so I fought against these things. And one of the early cases was Fuster against Andrade, in which I convinced the Supreme Court of the state of Minnesota-- by then, our Death Act had risen from $7,500 that went to $15,000. Then it went to $50,000. And eventually, it was removed.

So it was at a time when we didn't have-- I don't believe at that point in time did we have a death limit. And I convinced the court that the precedent was all wrong and that, in fact, it was not fair for a young person who had been killed with no fault of their own and in their teens, just ready to go to college-- and their parents had both worked very, very hard that the parents lost, didn't lose by way of pecuniary value, the value of the children. All that they could get were the funeral expenses.

And in the midst of the argument, Chief Justice Knudsen said, but Mr. Robbins, you're trying to establish new law. All the precedent is against you. And I told him, yes, I recognize the precedent is against me, but the precedent is wrong. And it was good for the colliery days in England when the children were working in the coal mines.

But here's a child that literally is the product of education. So the parents will be given to that child something that's much more valuable than working in a coal mine or working in a dump. And the father being a drunkard and the mother being a wastrel, that child, just because it worked during those days, had a pecuniary value. Whereas this child has nothing but funeral expenses.

And the court at that time decided that part of the damages were the loss of companionship, the loss of the possibility if the parents fell on hard times, that this child would be able to-- who'd been killed in a wrongful death would be able to support the parents. And so that became an element of damages. And it was a forerunner in the law.

SPEAKER: What about the Dalkon Shield litigation? How did your--

ROBBINS: Dalkon Shield litigation, we had assigned to us-- there had been a question raised with respect to conflict in solicitation of cases by Abbott and Pyle. We then went in. We tried those cases. And as part of a global settlement, after having gotten two verdicts, A.H. Robins agreed that they would recall the device because I was convinced that it was an abortifacient.

It was just a tool that aborted-- and I don't ask me whether I'm pro-life or anti-pro-life. I don't take a position. I'm not-- I generally speaking, try-- I try to stay away from criminal law. I try my utmost to do that because I would have difficulty representing someone who I knew was guilty. I know that they're entitled to be-

SPEAKER: Completely represented.

ROBBINS: Represented, yes. And that's the reason why I turned down a Supreme Court justice seat. I was offered a vacancy on the Supreme Court in the state of Minnesota by Judge Orville-- by Governor Orville Freeman. And I turned it down. I said, if there was a civil side, I'd be very happy to do it. But I can't pass judgment on another human being.