Civil suits have an external cost to society. They have a chilling effect on legal but similar behavior, and they make entities distrustful of one another. Inhibiting transactions reduces the effective opportunities for satisfaction of wants.
The most rational positive reason for assessing taxes is to capture the external cost of an entity's behavior. Being found guilty of harming another entity implies social wrong. Resorting to the courts to settle a grievance has a social cost.
And there is a third party, or I should say a pair of third parties, to the transaction. Law firms profit from the encouragement of suits at civil law, and so it is natural for them to do so. Law firms are organic systems. They adapt to suit their environment over time -- regardless of their conscious intent.
So; a tax acts as an inhibition on behavior, all the transaction participants to this behavior have created an external social cost by their part in the behavior, and the money collected would compensate society for those external costs. That seems like a pretty clean case for a tax.
Of course, it may be a bit of a challenge to convince legislators that inhibiting lawsuits is a good idea...
For further discussion: What would be the impact of assessing the tax against the advocates' fees and/or expenses? Would that be a relatively better, similar, or worse approach?
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