CHARLESTON — West Virginia lawmakers have spent years getting the state off the infamous “Judicial Hellhole” list, but actions by some Republican senators have now landed the state on a “Lawsuit Inferno” list.

A new report released Tuesday by the American Tort Reform Association singled out the Senate Judiciary Committee for placing West Virginia on the association’s 2025 Lawsuit Inferno list along with Colorado, Florida, Illinois, New York and Virginia.

States placed on the association’s Lawsuit Inferno list are accused of having lawmakers who benefit from campaign contributions from the personal injury attorneys lobby, passing legislation that expands legal liabilities and increase the opportunities for lawsuits or rejecting bills meant to expand tort reform.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was cited for rejecting two tort reform bills. Senate Bill 473, sponsored by Sens. Eric Tarr, R-Putnam, and Ryan Weld, R-Brooke, proposed significant changes to medical monitoring damages, such as requiring plaintiffs to prove a presently existing and diagnosable physical disease directly caused by the defendant’s conduct.

“We’ve been concerned about some matters in West Virginia,” said association President Tiger Joyce in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “We’ve been concerned for quite some time about the decision in the (West Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals) that enables plaintiffs to recover what’s what we call medical monitoring. We’ve been hopeful that the Legislature would take that up and the issue came up, but it wasn’t addressed.”

Senate Bill 543, sponsored by Tarr and Sen. Vince Deeds, R-Greenbrier, would have provided transparency and oversight of the hiring of private attorneys by local governments. Joyce said the state attorney general needs to have more say over private attorney hiring practices by cities and towns.

“In addition to state governments suing businesses as we’ve seen for over a generation, we are now seeing more and more that sometimes instead of states, we’re seeing local governments bringing lawsuits,” Joyce said. “That’s again another issue that we’re starting to see around the country and the fact is that it also was rejected by the Legislature.”

While rejecting consideration of those bills, senators sponsored 26 bills aimed at expanding legal liabilities containing new causes of legal action with 22 of those bills being sponsored by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, according to West Virginia Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse.

According to the report, Sen. Patrica Rucker, R-Jefferson, a Judiciary Committee member, was a sponsor of 10 liability-expanding bills during the 2025 legislative session. According to CALA, Rucker received about $25,000 for her 2024 re-election campaign and ranked third among a “Dirty Dozen” list of lawmakers who received campaign contributions from personal injury attorneys. A request for comment from Rucker was not returned.

The ATRA report called out five other Senate Judiciary Committee members for sponsoring liability-expanding bills: Senate Judiciary Committee Vice Chairman Tom Willis, R-Berkeley, sponsored eight bills; committee members Kevan Bartlett, R-Kanawha, and Brian Helton, R-Fayette, sponsored seven bills each; and committee members Mike Azinger, R-Wood, and Jay Taylor, R-Taylor, sponsored six bills.

According to ATRA, the economic effects of lawsuit costs result in an annual “tort tax” of $676 per person. It also results in 10,737 job losses by private businesses and approximately $1.175 billion in gross domestic product GDP loss.

West Virginia came off ATRA’s annual Judicial Hellhole list in 2017 after the Republican-led Legislature began passing tort reform bills in 2015, such as limiting the kinds of financial awards that can be issued in certain lawsuits, eliminating a joint liability rule that sometimes required defendants with minor involvement in a lawsuit to pay 100% of the damages in a lawsuit and capping punitive damage awards.

“Leadership is needed now, but in particular in the Legislature,” Joyce said. “That’s the point of our report, which is, as with the Judicial Hellhole report, to put a spotlight in this case on the Legislature and highlight what we believe are important reforms.”

In 2024, West Virginia was listed as a “Tort Reform Trailblazer” by ATRA for the work done by Republican lawmakers to make legal reforms. That year, the Legislature passed Senate Bill 850, dealing with third-party litigation financing; and Senate Bill 583, sponsored by Sen. Mike Stuart, R-Kanawha, which limits noneconomic damages in commercial vehicle cases.

Stuart was appointed the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the beginning of 2025 by Senate President Randy Smith, R-Preston. The bills taken up or not taken up by a committee during a legislative session are often decided by a majority of a committee’s Republican caucus. Speaking by phone Tuesday, Stuart said West Virginia’s inclusion on ATRA’s Lawsuit Inferno list should be a wake-up call to lawmakers.

“Civil justice reform is one of the most important things we can do in West Virginia to grow the economy,” Stuart said. “I understand that people who have been harmed need to be made whole from those harms, but we also need to make sure we have a legal climate that encourages growth and job development.”

“We’ve made huge improvements to move ourselves from that (Judicial Hellhole) list and become a more friendly place to do business…but what’s happened since that time as we have backslid and we’ve fallen backward,” Stuart continued. “I suspect we’re close to going back on the Judicial Hellhole list again. I suspect this is a warning flag that we ought to take note of before we get ourselves in a position where we’re on that flashing red light that goes around the country to businesses.”

Steven Allen Adams can be reached at sadams@newsandsentinel.com.