A USA Today story delves deeply into how Biden’s done the bidding of the litigation lobby special interest group, particularly with respect to the bipartisan asbestos litigation reform bill.
If you ignore that fact that I’m included, it’s an impressive list, as is the Lawyers for McCain Steering Committee. If you’re a law professor interested in joining the list, do drop me a line.
I should further disclose that I am doing some pretty exciting (if unpaid) consulting for the campaign; as it will require some travel, blogging will be light from me for the next few days.
I’m on the panel of bloggers polled by National Journal in its “Convention Daily” feature. Other familiar names include Betsy Newmark of Betsy’s Page, Patrick Frey of Patterico, and Jonathan Adler of Volokh Conspiracy. It’s a secret ballot, so I’m not going to say how I voted.
Also, thanks to the U.K.’s The Lawyer for their kind words on our recent ninth anniversary (Jul. 7); they describe us as the “grand old dame presiding over the world of legal blogs”, which I’m afraid tends to conjure up Dame Edna. And a blog item by Ed Mendel at the San Diego Union-Tribune (Jun. 26) gave a mention to our brief Bill Lerach rebuttal item in Portfolio, for which thanks too.
A couple of other mentions in recent months: Jane Daniel quoted me in Publisher’s Weekly in an article on litigation against small publishers (”So (Don’t) Sue Me: A small press faces the wrath of an unhappy author”, May 12). And Keithius of CoreDump writes (Jul. 21) that he is “reading Overlawyered again. I stopped reading for a while because it just depressed me.” Let’s all try to cheer him up.
The Delaware senator tapped as Obama’s running mate has just announced that he’s giving away to charity campaign contributions from participants in the Scruggs scandal, no doubt preparing for scrutiny of a set of connections that have already gotten considerable attention in the blogosphere [ABA Journal, NMC @ Folo, YallPolitics, Lattman @ WSJ law blog, Rossmiller, our own mention]. Lotus @ Folo wonders if the McCain camp will risk bringing up Scruggsiana given their own candidate’s former dealings with the disgraced lawyer.
In 2005, Sen. Biden praised “bottom-feeders” (his term) in the legal profession, saying it was worth it to let them collect big fees “to stop bad guys from doing bad things”. In another account, the Senator “began pounding the table in opposition to the bill [Class Action Fairness Act] as he praised plaintiffs attorneys”. On Sen. Biden’s overall alignment with the general trial lawyer cause, see our earlier links here, here, and here.
Members of Biden’s family, including brother Jim Biden and son Joseph (”Beau”) Biden III, who serves as Delaware attorney general, have figured in many news stories about the senator’s connections with the practicing law world. The state of Delaware, renowned for the high caliber of its legal system, has lately attracted an influx of asbestos lawsuits filed on behalf of residents of other states, a trend criticized by guestblogger Steven Hantler (of the Chrysler Corporation) last year. Credit-card companies are a mainstay of the Delaware economy, and Marc Ambinder notes Biden’s having “pushed the bankruptcy bill that Dems now hate”.
Orin Kerr @ Volokh, who is from Delaware himself, likes the Senator.
More: Carter Wood @ PoL on the Senator’s rating of “zero” on legal reform as judged by NAM. See also Ted’s further post. Open Secrets covers the Senator’s campaign finance. And now, as Lotus @ Folo notes, the AP’s Pete Yost and Holbrook Mohr have jumped on the Mississippi connection.
(Bumping Aug. 14 6:43 pm post to keep at the top of the page.)
In a post I made yesterday, I noted a transaction between Andrew Young and Timothy Toben that I suggested may raise the possibility of a sweetheart deal on the purchase and sale of a 5000-square-foot Raleigh home. I have since done some additional research that rules out that possibility–it turns out that Young purchased a plot of land in a different county, which explains what had otherwise appeared to be a discrepancy–but raises other interesting issues about Young’s cash flow shortly after the National Enquirer allegations first appeared. I have updated the post, and regret the error in the premise.
Update: See important update below. The Toben-Young transaction appears to be for a different parcel of land than the $1.2 million house–but the new documents reveal something else that’s interesting. More details below.
Andrew Young, who publicly claims to be the father of Rielle Hunter’s baby (though he hasn’t been heard from since John Edwards’s confession of an affair), was moved to Santa Barbara by the generosity of John Edwards’s campaign chairman, trial lawyer Fred Baron. He was paid $3,500/month to work for the Edwards campaign. Yet the Raleigh News & Observer reports that Andrew Young and his wife sold their Raleigh house to Carolyn Grissom for a jaw-dropping $1.2 million on February 14, 2007, and moved into the Chapel Hill Governors Club country-club gated community, where they rented a few doors down from Hunter. (Rentals there are available for as low as $1700/month, and home prices range from $289,000 to $2.3 million, so nothing necessarily unusual about that.)
(Update: New documents I’ve found show that the Toben-Young transaction appears to be for a different parcel of land than the $1.2 million house. More details below. This paragraph, based on the mistaken reading of the transaction that it was for the Raleigh home, is incorrect. I regret the error, but the correction reveals something else interesting about the Toben transaction; see the discussion below.) What’s more unusual is that North Carolina real-estate records on the web show that Andrew and Cheri Young purchased the 5000-square-foot house for $300,000 on September 28, 2005. (Update: this is incorrect. The house was purchased in 2001.) (The home was built in 1989, so they weren’t buying a vacant lot and building.) So either Andrew Young is a secret real-estate genius on a level not seen since Hillary Clinton’s commodities trading, and was able to flip a house for a 300% and $900,000 return in under eighteen months, or something else is going on.
It’s interesting to note that the Youngs purchased the place from North Carolina real-estate developer Timothy Toben–a long-time North Carolina Democratic fundraiser who donated $6,500 to the Edwards campaign in 2007 (which, if the FEC reports are accurate, exceeds the federal campaign limits substantially). If Toben gave Young an unusually good deal, the 2005 timing suggests that Young got the deal for some reason other than Rielle Hunter, but, if so, what?
Meanwhile, if one looks up the home on Zillow.com, one sees that Zillow is skeptical of the $1.2 million purchase price, and values the house for substantially less (though well over $300,000), because of “anomalies” in the deal, though it does not specify what those anomalies are. (I found no indication that Carolyn Grissom is anything other than an innocent homebuyer; she’s not listed in the FEC database.)
This could all be coincidence in hindsight, and there could be a perfectly innocent explanation for all of this. It could be that the $300,000 figure is wrong, though then that raises the question of how Young was able to afford a 5000-square-foot house on a $42,000/year salary. But reporters with more resources than I might want to look into whether an Edwards staffer was getting a sweetheart deal from an Edwards contributor, why, and whether campaign finance laws were violated.
And welcome Michelle Malkin readers; apologies that so many of you clicked through that you briefly crashed the site. For Overlawyered’s coverage of the Rielle Hunter scandal, see the tag, and don’t miss our years-long coverage of John Edwards and his trial-lawyer record.
(August 14: Welcome Kaus and Instapundit readers. Post was corrected August 14, because it incorrectly said “Chapel Hill” instead of “Raleigh” as the location of the $1.2 million house.)
Baron grants an interview to the Texas Lawyer, and makes some implausible claims:
Daniel Fisher usually understands legal issues and has done some good reporting about trial-lawyer abuses, so I was very disappointed in today’s Forbes.com story (which quotes me about Obama and CAFA). Most notably, it’s not true that tort reform is a “catchall phrase for legislative measures designed to make it harder for individuals to sue businesses”–many tort reforms make it easier for individuals with legitimate claims to sue businesses. Tort reforms are simply measures to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the civil justice system; they’re opposed by trial lawyers because they derive billions of dollars of wealth from inaccuracies and inefficiencies in the civil justice system, and supported by businesses and consumers that are the victims of such inaccuracies and inefficiencies.
The article also inaccurately characterizes the Obama-Clinton medical malpractice legislation, and furthers the idea of “Kennedy is a moderate,” blurring the role of the Supreme Court by implicitly endorsing the liberal idea of it as a political superlegislature rather than a judicial body with an obligation to follow the law. The focus on anti-preemption legislation, as opposed to some of the dozens of other pro-trial-lawyer-lobby bills pending in this Congress and likely to be renewed next Congress, is unusual. (Separately, I disagree with Jim Copland; I don’t think McCain would hesitate to veto the giveaways to the trial-lawyer lobby if they’re in single-purpose bills and not attached as hidden amendments to omnibus legislation.)
I’m less surprised than Fisher and Bill Childs that Obama is getting money from defense firms, or, more accurately, attorneys who work at defense firms. The legal establishment is overwhelmingly liberal (hence the 3:1 fundraising advantage Obama has), and many defense attorneys are perfectly happy with a status quo that requires companies to pay them millions of dollars to continue doing business. (Some are too happy, and have vocally supported ABA resolutions that would harm their clients–something their clients should pay closer attention to.)
While plaintiffs’ law firm contributions are often coordinated (sometimes a bit illegally, as when Tab Turner’s firm and Geoffrey Fieger’s firm were caught reimbursing their employees for donating to John Edwards), it’s a mistake to think the same thing happens in the defense bar, where attorneys are donating on an individual basis because they perceive future government administration (or Article III) jobs of a certain political caliber as pay-to-play or because they’re otherwise simply interested in the political process. Kirkland & Ellis may have tobacco and asbestos defense in its portfolio, and many alumni in the Bush administration, but most Kirkland attorneys are doing other things, and a disproportionate number of them at the Chicago-based firm are going to be former classmates of or students of Harvard Law graduate and Chicago Law lecturer Obama, and have the six- and seven-digit incomes to give maximum contributions–and it only takes a few dozen $4600 contributions to make a firm look like a big contributor. (And, on the other hand, as if to demonstrate the bipartisan nature of most law firms, John McCain turned to a Republican attorney, former Reagan White House Counsel A.B. Culvahouse, at the largely Democratic O’Melveny & Myers to lead his vice presidential search.) During the primaries, the trial lawyers were giving most of their money to Edwards, Clinton, and Biden, but those fundraisers are now doing business with Obama, as the recent press coverage of Fred Baron shows.
But the article is correct that the outlook for federal tort reform is grim, and that reformers are looking at rearguard actions defending against numerous attempts to make the system worse.
We described the Dallas attorney as poster boy for legal ethics for his astoundingly brazen conduct in the scandal over an asbestos testimony-coaching memo. Now his name is hitting front pages on the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter affair:
Dallas lawyer Fred Baron told The Dallas Morning News today that he paid relocation and housing expenses for the woman that former presidential candidate John Edwards has confessed to having an affair with.
Mr. Baron, who was chairman of Mr. Edwards’ presidential campaign finance committee, said he paid money for Rielle Hunter to move from North Carolina to another location. …
He said Mr. Edwards did not know about the arrangement.
(Gromer Jeffers Jr., “Dallas lawyer Fred Baron paid for Edwards’ mistress to relocate”, Dallas Morning News, Aug. 8).
More coverage of Edwards’s (partial or otherwise) confession: ABC News, AP, Memeorandum, Marc Ambinder, Ben Smith/Politico, News & Observer, Just One Minute, Shaun Mullen/Moderate Voice. Readers will remember that Ted had the story very, very early, before it was much noticed even on the blogs (more). As for Edwards’s own credibility, Mickey Kaus, whose news judgment in pursuing the matter now stands vindicated, has this to say: “There is now one player in this scandal with far less credibility than the National Enquirer, after all.”
More: Byron York at NRO “Corner” quotes the Raleigh News & Observer account with Baron’s statement:
“I decided independently to help two friends and former colleagues rebuild their lives when harassment by supermarket tabloids made it impossible for them to conduct a normal life,” Baron, a Dallas trial lawyer said in a statement, Rob Christensen reports.
“John Edwards was not aware that assistance was provided to anyone involved in this matter,” Baron said. “I did it of my own voilition and without the knowledge, instruction, or suggestion of John Edwards or anyone else. The assistance was offered and accepted without condition.”
York points out:
Hunter and Young, the recipients of Baron’s generosity, were not high-ranking officials in the Edwards campaign. How Baron got to know them and how he decided to fund their move to California, and why he decided to do so without Edwards’ knowledge, might be the subject of more questions as the Edwards matter goes forward.
Blogger Gina Cobb hopes the window of Baron’s generosity is still open:
I am touched and moved by your generosity. I especially like the part about “The assistance was offered and accepted without condition.” Accordingly, I would like to request the same generosity from you. Henceforward, I would like you to rent me an enormous house and pay my living expenses in perpetuity. I can assure you that the assistance you offer will be accepted without condition.
And see Ted’s follow-up post.
Alberta, Canada, acquits Ezra Levant over publication of Mohammed cartoons, and it only cost him C$100,000* [National Post, his site, Daimnation]*Levant can recover nothing from his tormentors because the so-called human rights tribunals are given a special dispensation from the normally prevailing Canadian rule of loser-pays.
In a daring journalistic departure, yesterday’s New York Times “Style” section piece actually interviewed some people who use the product. (Mireya Navarro, “Take Away Their Menthols? Is That Cool?”, Aug. 3). The paper’s coverage a week ago, by contrast, hewed more strictly to the favored narrative of the “tobacco control” crowd, vilifying as corrupt black members of Congress not yet ready to jump on board in banning a product very popular with their constituents. (Stephanie Saul, “Blacks in Congress Split Over Menthol Cigarettes”, Jul. 25).
Analyzing the upcoming race between the incumbent, Darrell McGraw, and his clean-government opponent, Dan Greear, the West Virginia Record has an extensive story on the West Virginia attorney general’s habit of giving lucrative no-bid contingency-fee contracts to his campaign contributors, as well as holding on to settlement money for his own personal slush fund. I am quoted at length and described as “widely regarded as one of the country’s leading voices in tort reform.” Also notable are quotes from another “Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who has written articles about the need for reform.” Kim Strassel also has a good piece on the subject in Friday’s Wall Street Journal:
To Mr. Greear’s advantage, his opponent is a case study of abuse in office. Mr. McGraw, in more than 14 years as West Virginia’s attorney general, has been a pioneer in the practice of filing questionable lawsuits against big companies, secretly doling out the legal work to outside trial lawyer friends who reap millions in fees. Those lawyers then turn around and donate heavily to Mr. McGraw’s re-election.
Polls show the public, in theory, disapproves. In a Tarrance Group survey last year, 75% of West Virginians think an attorney general should publicly disclose outside contracts with lawyers. Nearly 60% think attorneys should have to competitively bid for those jobs.
It’s this that motivates Mr. Greear. “I’ve watched what’s going on and thought: ‘If I were doing this to a client, I’d lose my law license.’ I don’t think any fair-thinking person can think this is good government, or good solid legal representation for West Virginia,” he tells me.
Also helping is that Mr. McGraw’s own sense of political immortality has recently landed him, and his state, in hot water. In 2001, he appointed four private law firms to sue drug companies for alleged deceptive advertising of OxyContin. Having forced a settlement in 2004, he handed his tort allies $3.3 million of the $10 million haul. Mr. McGraw had sued on behalf of state agencies (including the state’s Medicaid program) — yet his office kept the rest of the settlement money.
The federal government, which pays a significant portion of the state’s Medicaid bills, remains furious the program received none of the settlement, and is now threatening to withhold millions in Medicaid money. Mr. Greear is hitting hard on the uproar, using it to suggest Mr. McGraw has lost sight of why he’s suing companies, other than for the headlines.
I’m quoted by Quin Hillyer in an Examiner story today about the dozens of bills pending in Congress that engage in tort deform–favors for the trial bar. The new Trial Lawyer Earmarks website does a marvelous job documenting most of the bills out there, though one wishes it would provide direct links to THOMAS rather than forcing one to engage in separate searches. (Mislink and misspelling corrected.)
The Texas Review of Law & Politics has published my review of Thomas Geoghegan’s book. I differ from the favorable reviews of Adam Liptak and others:
Many books and writers have documented the problems caused by the tremendous expansion of liability in the last half century. In response, several writers on the political left have written defenses of unfettered liability or indictments of the tort reform movement, sometimes even rationalizing such infamous outliers as the McDonald’s coffee case as legitimate uses of the tort system.
The latest arrival in this genre comes from much-celebrated labor lawyer and author Thomas Geoghegan: See You in Court: How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation. Unlike many on his political side of the aisle, Geoghegan acknowledges that the litigation explosion has harmed America, but blames it on right-wing policies. Deregulation, deunionization, and the right’s putative dismantling of the legal system and Rule of Law, Geoghegan argues, have driven Americans to the courts by cutting off alternative routes to social justice. Geoghegan effectively demonstrates that the left should view skeptically the claims of the litigation lobby, a skepticism sadly disappearing from the political discourse as the Democratic Party more and more reflexively adopts the positions of trial-lawyer benefactors at the expense of its other constituents. But Geoghegan’s attempt to blame conservatives for the increased role of litigation in society suffers from non sequiturs, self-contradictory arguments, and a general failure to engage his opponents’ arguments fairly.
Thanks to those at Overlawyered who commented on an earlier draft and helped make the paper better by reminding me that political contributions were a revealed preference.
Stuart Taylor agrees that the courts are right to rebuke some of the Bush administration’s aggressive war-powers claims, but that doesn’t make it anything other than a “deeply misguided” notion to try its leaders for supposed “war crimes”, let alone encourage other countries to snatch traveling U.S. ex-officials for trial there (”Our Leaders Are Not War Criminals”, National Journal, Jun. 28).
One of the most dedicated enthusiasts for such trials is attorney/controversialist Scott Horton, who writes at Harper’s and Balkinization and is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia Law School; after noticing how often Horton’s output seemed to be in need of fact-checking, I spent a few minutes just for the fun of it stringing together a sampling of such instances which appears here (scroll).
I’m quoted by Amanda Erickson in today’s Chicago Tribune:
In autos; FDA; media bias; politics; preemption; product liability; Public Citizen; publicity; rollover litigation; Ted Frank
Illinois state Rep. Jay Hoffman of Madison County, who doubles as an attorney with the Lakin Law Firm, is also said to be a big-time political fundraiser and a key link between the county’s far-famed class-action culture and the world of Illinois politics. Hoffman has long been a close and loyal advisor to now-Gov. Rod Blagojevich, something that’s no longer such a big political advantage what with the Rezko trial having badly sullied the governor’s reputation. Things got worse last month when Hoffman’s name came up during some of the most explosive testimony at that trial, though he’s been charged with no wrongdoing. And now he’s at odds with a fellow Democrat, state house Speaker Michael Madigan — himself a longtime guardian of trial lawyer interests in Springfield — following what the St. Louis Post-Dispatch describes as “the airing of a secret memo from [Madigan's] staff directing legislative candidates to call for Blagojevich’s impeachment — complete with instructions to deny that they’re getting instructions.” (AP’s version). Ed Murnane of the Illinois Civil Justice League has more at Illinois Review, as do the editorialists of the Chamber-backed Madison County Record, while Eric Zorn of the Tribune and ArchPundit speculate that Blagojevich might appoint Hoffman to Barack Obama’s seat in the U.S. Senate should his election as President leave it vacant.
Point of Law Volokh