Defending Against Emerging Attacks on Civil Justice in the 119th Congress

What Is Civil Justice?

Civil justice refers to the legal system for individuals or other entities to resolve legal disputes. Access to that system is important so that individuals can seek relief through the courts for corporate or government wrongdoing. Accessing the courts, however, has become increasingly difficult because corporations actively work to create roadblocks to shield themselves from accountability. For example, corporations often include in consumer and employer contracts lengthy and complicated terms that require any future disputes to be resolved in private arbitration proceedings, rather than in court.

Public Citizen has a long history of working to protect people’s access to the civil justice system. We call out and oppose corporate initiatives that seek to limit or eliminate people’s access to the courts, and we litigate to preserve access to the court system. Given the large number of corporate-friendly Members of Congress, we anticipate new and continued attacks on everyday people’s access to the civil justice system.

What Do Civil Justice Attacks Look Like?

If attempts to obstruct access to civil justice are successful, our collective ability to hold government and powerful corporations accountable for harm will be severely curtailed. This concern is not abstract, it has been a longtime goal of industry to push everyday people out of the courtrooms. In the current Congress we anticipate that industry lobbyists will continue to push lawmakers to work to diminish or eliminate people’s access to the courts in several ways.

This resource outlines some civil justice attacks that we may see in the 119th Congress, including both new legislative threats and some that we have seen before.

Shielding Corporations from Liability for Wrongdoing

In several industries, corporations have long lobbied lawmakers to enact laws that shield them from liability for any harm they might cause. By barring injured people from seeking redress, immunity shields encourage corporations to cut corners on health and safety measures, which exacerbates the risk of harm to the public. For example, in 2005, President Bush signed into law the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which granted gun manufacturers and sellers unprecedented immunity from lawsuits, thereby sharply decreasing their incentive to improve the safety of their products (such as through trigger locks, child-proofing, and other safety measures).

Ongoing efforts to shield corporations from liability for wrongdoing include:

The fossil fuel industry is working to shield itself from accountability for deceiving the public about climate change. The fossil fuel industry is seeking liability protections that

would block efforts by individuals, municipalities, and states to hold fossil fuel companies responsible for their role in exacerbating climate change, climate disasters, and extreme weather events, through deceptive practices. This threat is imminent. On March 13, 2025 almost 200 groups, including Public Citizen, submitted a letter to Democratic leaders in Congress asking them to oppose immunity shields for the fossil fuel industry. Then, on April 8, 2025, President Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting American Energy from State Overreach.” The executive order directs Attorney General Pam Bondi to stop the enforcement of state laws used to address climate change and the ongoing lawsuits that several states have brought against fossil fuel producers seeking compensation for deceptive and misleading practices.

The generative artificial intelligence (AI) industry is working to shield itself from damages incurred by people using emerging technologies. The rapid integration of AI generated content in the services sector, including the financial, entertainment, and healthcare industries, provides users with instantaneous access to information. Risks associated with the use of AI—like the ability to create more dangerous autonomous weapons, the mass dissemination of incorrect or misleading information, and the ability to generate fake content, including explicit deepfake images—have led to public recognition of the need for accountability for companies whose AI platforms generate harmful content.

Dangers associated with the rapidly expanding field of generative AI highlight the need for strict guardrails to mitigate foreseeable risks—a mantle that many states have taken up, while federal lawmakers have dragged their feet. Corporate-friendly lawmakers, though, are currently taking steps to shield the AI industry from civil liability. For example, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) proposed a provision in the budget reconciliation bill that would force states not to enforce their AI laws for the next ten years, by threatening to withhold billions of dollars of essential broadband funding for underserved communities. While this provision was stricken from the Senate’s version of the bill, we expect corporate friendly lawmakers to continue their attacks on state and local regulation of AI.

Putting Profits Over Patients

Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from preventable medical errors. Rather than focusing on improving the medical system to treat sick people safely and prevent needless deaths and injuries, insurance companies and the medical lobby spend vast amounts of resources attacking injured patients’ right to seek full recovery in the courts.

These attacks seek to obstruct victims’ ability to present a successful claim before the courts at every turn. For example, the medical and insurance industries seek to evade accountability by limiting the amount of time victims have to file a claim, litigation funding sources, the fees that plaintiffs’ attorneys can collect through contingency agreements, who can present expert witness testimony, and the monetary damages a victim can collect and from whom. They also push for payments to be made to the injured patient in installments over long periods of time, prolonging the individuals’ ability to obtain full compensation.