The more than 200,000 asbestos lawsuits pending around the nation are proceeding very nicely, in the view of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America–whose members are collecting contingency fees by the billions–and Congress should leave well enough alone.

”The courts are well equipped to handle the pending and future asbestos cases that will require trial,” Richard Middleton of Savannah, the ATLA’s president-elect, assured the House Judiciary Committee at a July 1 hearing on a bill designed to move asbestos compensation claims out of the courts. ”A litigation crisis, as that term is usually understood, does not exist.”

All nine Supreme Court Justices disagree. And the Justices’ three opinions in Ortiz vs. Fibreboard Corp., on June 23, lay down a challenge that Congress should not evade.

”The elephantine mass of asbestos cases . . . defies customary judicial administration and calls for national legislation,” Justice David H. Souter wrote for the Court, while setting aside as multiply flawed a $ 1.5 billion class action settlement of as many as 186,000 potential claims against one company.

The asbestos litigation miasma ”cries out for a legislative solution,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist added in a concurrence. Justices Stephen G. Breyer and John Paul Stevens argued in dissent that the class action settlement should have been upheld. But they emphatically agreed that the courts have been overwhelmed by the sheer number of asbestos claims, which raises the specter of ”delay and expense so great as to bring about a massive denial of justice.”

Breyer and Stevens noted in particular a study showing that ”attorney’s fees and other ‘transaction costs’ . . . consume an estimated 61 cents (of each dollar paid by asbestos defendants), with only 39 cents going to victims.”

Other facts bolstering the Justices’ calls for a congressional resolution of the asbestos litigation crisis include these: An estimated 13 million to 21 million workers have been exposed to asbestos, mostly over 30 years ago. Hundreds of thousands of them–a tragically huge number, but a small percentage of all possible asbestos-exposed plaintiffs–either suffer or will suffer from asbestosis, mesothelioma, or other asbestos-induced illnesses.

Some 200,000 claims by alleged victims of asbestos exposure are now pending, up from 100,000 in 1993. Another 40,000 claims are filed each year, choking both state and federal courts.

A growing percentage of these plaintiffs–perhaps a majority of those currently filing suit–do not have and probably never will have asbestos-induced diseases; most of them do have clinically observable changes in the pleural membrane and are worried that they may become sick.

A few lawyers have signed up huge numbers of asbestos plaintiffs and have used their abilities to shop for the most sympathetic judges and juries in order to threaten defendants with ruin, forcing them into mass settlements.

Defendants have agreed to include in such settlements many plaintiffs with mild or nonexistent symptoms to avoid betting their companies on the whims of juries such as the one in Texas that awarded $ 115 million in (mostly punitive) damages to 21 plaintiffs who claimed to have cases of asbestosis ranging from ”mild” to ”asymptomatic.”

The Supreme Court has expressed concern that the interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers (as well as of the defendants) in negotiating mass settlements are at odds with the interests of many of their clients.

Because crushing damage awards and litigation costs have driven at least 25 companies into bankruptcy (including almost all asbestos manufacturers), plaintiffs’ lawyers are now suing companies with peripheral roles in the use of asbestos.

The litigation costs threaten to bankrupt so many companies that many sick plaintiffs will be left with no solvent defendants who can plausibly be sued.

The real question is not whether this mess warrants congressional action. Clearly it does. It is whether the pending bill is a good solution, or whether the plaintiffs’ lawyers and labor unions are correct in claiming it will leave deserving plaintiffs even worse off than they are now.

Called the Fairness in Asbestos Compensation Act, the bill is sponsored by Republicans, including House Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, and some notable Democrats, including Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Charles E. Schumer of New York.

The bill seeks faster, fairer resolution of asbestos claims by moving them out of the courts and into a new administrative claims processing agency, to be run by a presidentially appointed board.

Plaintiffs would first have to submit medical evidence to an expert panel that would determine whether they have enough proof of asbestos-induced illness to be eligible for compensation. The objective is to screen out those who are not currently impaired, while ensuring that they will not be barred from seeking compensation if they become impaired later.

Those found medically eligible for compensation would be encouraged to negotiate settlements with defendants within a mandatory mediation period. If mediation failed, plaintiffs could choose between binding arbitration and suing in a state or federal court. To encourage reasonable offers, defendants would be assessed a financial penalty whenever a plaintiff won an award 25 percent above the defendant’s offer. Punitive damages and consolidation of cases would be barred, and contingent fees capped at 25 percent of any recovery.

Proponents say this system would bring many asbestos victims better compensation than the current one, and would do so within four to six months compared with the current two to five years.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers counter that by taking away some existing legal remedies (such as punitive damages), the bill would leave thousands of asbestos victims mired in a cumbersome new federal bureaucracy and, in many cases, barred from suing by unduly strict standards for proving that they suffer from asbestos-induced illness.

If the plaintiffs’ lawyers are right, then the bill should be rejected. The priority should be maximizing (and expediting) compensation for real victims of asbestos, not minimizing the cost to industry.

But the bill’s supporters have the better of the argument. Along with some defendants and industry groups, the supporters include Harvard law professor Christopher Edley Jr., a liberal Democrat who has been one of President Clinton’s chief advisers on racial issues; Paul R. Verkuil, dean of Yeshiva University’s law school; Louis W. Sullivan, who was Health and Human Services Secretary under President Bush; and other medical and legal experts.

These experts are being paid by an organization financed by asbestos defendants. It is difficult to find an asbestos litigation expert who can be called completely disinterested– least of all the trial lawyers, who have a huge financial stake in perpetuating the status quo.

The unions have more credibility, and the combination of their clout with that of the trial lawyers may well doom the bill to death at the hands of Democrats. But the unions could conceivably support an amended bill. And their position masks some conflicts of interest among their members: While the current litigation system serves the short-term interests of asbestos- exposed workers who want ”compensation” now, even though they may never become sick, it hurts those who may become sick after all available defendants have been driven into bankruptcy.

The pending bill seems a better bet to provide timely, adequate compensation to victims who are already impaired and to keep the defendant companies out of bankruptcy and thereby ensure that their assets will be available to compensate those who become impaired in the future.

And Edley hasn’t given up. He says, ”There’s substantial interest in this among Democrats, because those folks, like me, think it’s a pro-victim bill.”

”The only losers,” as Edley testified at the July 1 hearing, ”are lawyers and individuals who are not now sick, who will never become sick (because of asbestos exposure) in the future, and who would have won the ‘jury lottery’ under our current tort system.”

Meanwhile, those who were once victimized by now- bankrupted asbestos manufacturers are being victimized again as the scarce resources for compensation are squandered on lawyers, expert witnesses, punitive damage windfalls, and payments to thousands who will never suffer from asbestos-induced diseases.

That’s what’s happening now. And that’s what will happen unless and until Congress fixes the asbestos litigation mess.