According to Travis Kalanick, trial lawyers and insurance companies are the main forces behind bad transportation regulations. He argues that insurance companies are not incentivized to eliminate accidents, as their business model relies on making a margin on predictable risk. More accidents, as long as they are priced correctly, mean higher premiums and a larger business.

A significant opponent to the adoption of autonomous vehicles is the trial lawyers' lobby. Their business model relies on accidents and injuries, so the increased safety of self-driving cars poses an existential threat to their revenue stream, leading them to actively lobby against the technology for nearly a decade.

A single multi-million dollar lawsuit against Meta is financially trivial. The real threat is the precedent it sets for thousands of similar cases, creating a wave of litigation and public pressure for regulation akin to the legal battles that ultimately hobbled the tobacco industry.

Lawyers often act as "handmaidens of the rich," enabling wealthy individuals and communities to use the legal system to block public good projects like mass transit or affordable housing. This subverts the public interest and creates a society that functions well for the wealthy but fails the majority.

California law allows lawsuits for minor issues like chipping paint up to 10 years after construction. This extreme litigation risk makes financing and insuring for-sale condos nearly impossible, eliminating the most accessible path to homeownership for young people.

California's housing crisis is exacerbated by construction defect liability laws. These regulations create a lucrative environment for trial lawyers to sue builders years after completion, making it nearly impossible to get financing or insurance for new condos and removing a crucial rung on the homeownership ladder.

The wins against Meta and Google are not isolated events but "bellwether" cases that have opened the floodgates for litigation. With this new product liability strategy validated, a massive pipeline of over 1,500 similar lawsuits from individuals, schools, and states is now set to move forward, posing an existential risk.

Law is supposed to be a framework that forbids bad actions (proscription) while safeguarding an open field of freedom. Over the last 60 years, it has become a tool for dictating exactly how to do everything (prescription), turning that open field into a legal minefield.

Every negative news story creates a legislative impulse to add more rules for safety. This "safetyism" leads to layers of process and bureaucracy that ultimately hinder progress. It's a politically safe way for legislators to appear active without being accountable for actual outcomes.