Pertinent Legal Objectives

To chart the long-term direction of Pacific Legal Foundation, the Board of Trustees maintains a set of Legal Objectives representing the core values of the organization and its overall purpose. Within this list are four Objectives that specifically address the issues of defending freedom and supporting free enterprise. These Objectives are:

• In that America’s economic freedom depends on the entrepreneurial spirit and energy of free enterprise that conduces the production and consumption of goods and services, thus promoting individual growth and opportunity, all three branches of government should consider the impact of their actions on a free and vibrant American economy.
  
  
• The entrepreneurial spirit underlying free enterprise depends upon respect for the people’s right to enter into, be bound by, and to enforce contractual obligations, and neither government institutions nor the civil justice system should diminish or impair the obligation of contract.
  
  
• Regulations that impose bureaucratically defined concepts for safety, environmental protection, or economic relationships must take into account the economic and social costs of the regulation.
  
  
• The civil justice system should promote responsibility and redress actual, significant individual injuries, rather than functioning as a social insurance system by providing the means to redistribute wealth from “deep pockets” to opportunistic litigants, or allowing judges to exercise policy-making functions more properly performed by representatives accountable to the people. Moreover, the civil justice system should exercise restraint in expanding legal theories and remedies.