Can business groups beat lawyers? They did in 2004. They could in 2005.

The 2004 elections marked a victory not only for values voters but also for business groups. Business interests helped elect officials broadly sympathetic to economic competition and efficiency. Their involvement was especially decisive in legal battles.

Business targeted 13 judicial races and prevailed in 12. In West Virginia, voters knocked off an incumbent Supreme Court justice whose rulings protected billion-dollar claims brought by his son, a prominent trial lawyer. Mississippi and Ohio each elected three business-backed justices, thus ensuring that liability reforms (Mississippi) and asbestos reforms (Ohio) will survive judicial challenges. Business groups won all the attorney general races they targeted.

Voters in several states approved tort reforms, often by wide margins. Lawyer fee limitations were passed in Florida and Nevada. Wyoming required mandatory mediation before litigation against health care providers. A hugely important liability reform passed in California: By an astounding 59 to 41 percent, voters imposed a constitutional amendment that sharply limits private lawsuits under the state's Business and Professions Code. That one-of-a-kind law had allowed literally anyone to sue any business in the state on behalf of the general public, and facilitated legal extortion of dry cleaners, car dealers, and other industries, as well as ideological crusades in legal garb. No longer.

The 2004 results strongly suggest that America's seemingly inexorable tide of lawsuits can be stemmed after all. These results build on earlier successes: Once-notorious Alabama fixed its tort system and courts some years ago, as did Texas. More recently, tort meccas like Mississippi, Florida, and Ohio managed to enact meaningful reforms.

These reforms often took hold after businesses announced that ruinous liability laws would prevent the location of new enterprises within the state. In Mississippi, Toyota informed state officials that the company's decision about whether to build a local production facility would depend on the enactment of liability reform. The company used its economic leverage and its public pronouncements to change a state once notorious for frivolous lawsuits.

It is far too early to celebrate an end to the liability crisis. As trial lawyers dig in their heels, it remains difficult and expensive to turn around suit-happy states. Some--like New Mexico, which sports both a socialist attorney general and an intransigent Supreme Court, and Montana, where ...