Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any of his constituents injured by out of state parties can do exactly the same thing he did. Any injury he suffers at the hands of a Kansas company will be subject to the same damage limits that such injuries suffered by his constituents are. I don't see how this is either hypocrisy (as alleged in the article you link to) or denying his constituents some benefit that is allowed to him (as you claim). I am curious wh…
> I don't see how this is either hypocrisy Seriously, you don't? It's all "over burdensome regulation" and "tort lawyers looking for a huge payday" until it's YOUR child that is hurt or killed. Legislator is damn lucky the tortfeasor was from out of state.
No, I don't. The definition of hypocrisy is "the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform".
He voted for a law that resulted in reduced damages for torts committed in Kansas by Kansas companies but did not reduce damages for torts committed in Kansas by non-Kansas companies, at least in some circumstances [1].
This suggests that his moral standards or beliefs at the time he voted for the law were that out-of-state companies should be subject to higher damages than Kansas companies [2]. (That's a crappy moral standard and belief, but that's not relevant from a hypocrisy perspective).
He later was a plaintiff in a tort case against a non-Kansas company, and asked for higher damages than he would be able to get from a Kansas company. This is not acting in a way that does not conform to moral standards or beliefs that his vote suggests he holds.
The essence of hypocrisy is telling everyone to act one way and then acting in a different way yourself. Here he is acting in the same way the law he voted for allows all Kansans to act, so we cannot infer hypocrisy.
That doesn't mean he should not be criticized strongly. The law he voted for is very bad on two counts. First, by severely limiting damages on torts committed by Kansas companies, it harms those company's Kansas victims.
Second, by having different limits depending on whether it is a Kansas company or not, it means that different Kansas plaintiffs who suffer similar injuries from a tortfeasor in Kansas can face vastly different damage limits depending on where the tortfeasor happens to be incorporated. That's fundamentally unfair.
[1] The injury lawyer blog that was cited just says there is "apparently" a "quirk" in Kansas law, and the cite is just a newspaper article that just says it may have something to do with choice of law, so it is not clear exactly how this thing came about.
[2] I'm assuming that there is some basic competence on the part of the Kansas legislature and their staff that actually prepare legislation, so that when they decided to lower damage limits on torts they knew about this mysterious quirk and knew that they were writing their legislation in a way that would not eliminate it.