Congress sent President Bush a crucial bill that will introduce greater changes into the American legislation by making it easier for defendants to move many multistate class actions into federal court.

According to the bill, civil cases are to be removed from state courts if the total claims exceed $5 million. The main goal of this bill, believe its supporters, lies in adjusting the U.S. court system to Congress’s own powers over interstate commerce.

The bill could encourage business to push the Republican-controlled Congress for additional changes to the nation’s court system. The next item on the business agenda is toughening standards on consumer bankruptcies, reported from the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. For some other business priorities -- such as limiting medical malpractice suits and asbestos litigation -- broad support hasn’t united, making legislation more difficult to pass.

Critics say the result will be anything but efficient from the consumer’s standpoint. The Consumer Federation of America said the bill "essentially denies consumers access to a uniquely important legal tool against corporate wrongdoing" by virtually "wiping out" state class actions.

Some corporate executives expect the number of class-action cases filed in state courts to shrink. Many companies would give preference to federal courts in class actions, because the quality of judges and juries is regarded to be superior to that in state courts. Federal judges are appointed for life, unlike state judges some of whom are elected officials depending on plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Business executives flooded the White House on February 16 forcing President Bush to sign the legislation immediately.

The legislation was immediately welcomed by a number of industries starting from tobacco to drugs and technology. Cigarette companies have become some of the most high-profile defendants of class-action lawsuits. In 2003, Philip Morris USA, the domestic tobacco arm of Altria Group Inc., was ordered by a Madison County, Ill., court to pay $10.1 billion for allegedly misleading smokers who purchased light cigarettes. The ruling, which is on appeal, prompted major credit-rating downgrades and a stock selloff as investors worried that the tobacco unit may be forced to declare bankruptcy, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The legislation doesn’t exert impact on any existing anti-tobacco class actions, including so-called light class-action cases, in which smokers are suing tobacco companies for having misled smokers into thinking that light cigarettes are less dangerous compared with other brands. But the legislation would likely ensure that most new class actions against tobacco are filed in federal court.

As far as drug companies are concerned, the legislation won’t eliminate all legal cases, but it will likely relieve the pressure in certain kinds of cases. Most personal-injury lawsuits, in which a patient indicts a pharmaceutical company for harming him by a drug use wouldn’t be affected by the new law because they are filed individually in state courts, not as class-action cases.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers were satisfied by the fact that the bill sent to the president excluded many of the proposals they had most feared. "The bill contains no caps on damages, no caps on legal fees and no substantive changes to tort law," said Todd Smith, president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America.

Moreover, the bill prohibits the automatic removal to federal court of individual cases that are united only for pretrial discovery, or of so-called mass-actions, when a great number of individual claims are scrutinized at once.

Still, the bill is not considered to be a panacea. Some experts said they expect plaintiffs’ lawyers to find ways to circumvent the restrictions.