(FORTUNE Magazine) – ''Go do a Nexis search on how the lawyers are making it impossible to check job references,'' was the lead on a recent unsolicited story suggestion, ''and you will find a zillion examples.'' We never did get up to a zillion, but our favorite electronic database soon enough kicked out 55 highly depressing entries in response to our search request, which was to look at all newspaper and magazine articles wherein ''reference'' and ''suit'' appear in propinquity to ''employer'' or ''employee.'' As you are already intuiting, the composite moral of this output was unflattering to the American legal system, increasingly identifiable as a menace to the American economic system. It does seem that employers in their right minds no longer speak candidly to other employers about particular employees. Eastman Kodak no longer gives any personal references. Numerous other companies have adopted the ''name, rank, and serial number'' approach. Xerox, for example, will divulge only the fact that the party was employed, the dates and work location of the employment, and the job title for the most recent position held. Xerox will not tell you if the guy pulled a knife on the supervisor or, indeed, if he was fired. This reticence is designed to protect it from slander, libel, and defamation suits, now rampant and sometimes quite expensive. Our Nexis search turned up several references to settlements over $1 million. According to Theodore J. St. Antoine, professor of labor law at the University of Michigan law school, nearly 10% of the non-union and non-civil-service employees fired each year end up suing the folks who canned them. The lawyers have labored to expand the law of torts (i.e., civil wrongs) to make them cover references resulting in somebody's not getting the job. Some employers have tried to dodge the bullet by giving only favorable references. Lerner Publications in Minneapolis says it is ready to give out positive reports on employees who have done a good job but would never dare issue a negative report. But you can get sued for issuing no references at all. In a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, a fellow who was fired brought suit against his former employer, claiming that he was being damaged by its failure to provide any references to prospective future employers. Furthermore, other employers can sue you if you don't provide references -- if, say, your failure to warn them against a worker's drug problems resulted in their hiring him to drive a school bus that he subsequently wrecked. Companies that don't provide references are also potentially susceptible to something called ''defamation by self-publication,'' arguably the most ambitious item on the agenda of the plaintiffs' bar. This is the deal where Company A fires the employee for, say, stealing, and the employee denies | the charges. But then he tries to get another job at Company B, which asks him how come he lost the first job. When he says he was accused of stealing, he has in principle broadcast the defamation created by Company A -- which he can now turn around and sue (assuming, of course, that he is in a position to argue his innocence). Plaintiffs' attorney Joseph Posner of Encino, California, says this cause of action is ''an untapped gold mine.'' How long will it remain untapped? Here in America, that is always the question.