As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me.

Elizabeth Thornburg, Justinian Lane, and then Richard Neely himself all claimed that Neely was being “ironic” or “sarcastic.” Of course, as numerous other quotes from the book (not to mention Neely’s contemporaneous observations) show, no one who has actually read the book could possibly believe that Neely was being ironic.

So this is perhaps entirely redundant, but it is worth providing some cumulative evidence from a check of the public record. For example, Neely claims he was being “ironic” to “sell books” and didn’t really mean it. Then what’s his excuse when he explicitly used the same reasoning in an opinion he wrote as a West Virginia Supreme Court Justice as a rationale for unjustly treating a corporate defendant?

Indeed, in some world other than the one in which we live, where this Court were called upon to make national policy, we might very well take a meat ax to some current product liability rules. Therefore, we do not claim that our adoption of rules liberal to plaintiffs comports, necessarily, with some Platonic ideal of perfect justice. Rather, for a tiny state incapable of controlling the direction of national law in terms of appropriate trade-offs among employment, research, development, and compensation for the injured users of products, the adoption of rules liberal to plaintiffs is simple self-defense. [Blankenship v. General Motors Corp., 406 S.E.2d 781, 786 (W.Va. 1991).]

If Neely was being “ironic” here, someone should give General Motors back its money.

It’s also worth noting that Justice Neely said the exact same thing in testimony before Congress on September 12, 1991 (139 Cong. Rec. S2090-02):

If you ask the average state judge whether she would like to redistribute some wealth from, say, Colt firearms to a local resident who was severely injured in a shooting accident, the judge will probably answer “yes.” But if you ask the same judge to make a choice between high local employment in Colt’s plants on the one hand, and redistribution of Colt’s money on the other, she is likely to favor high employment over simple wealth redistribution. The problem is that except for the U.S. Supreme Court, no American judge can affect these trade-offs.

If, for example, as a West Virginia judge I insist that West Virginia have conservative product liability law, all I will do is reduce my friends’ and neighbors’ claims on the existing pool of product liability insurance paid for by consumers through “premiums” incorporated into the price of everything we buy. This is the explicit rationale of Blankenship versus General Motors, 406 S.E.2d 781 (W.Va. 1991). …

Thus, as a state judge I have admitted in a unanimous opinion written for the highest court of one of the fifty states that we, as a state court, cannot be rational in the crafting of product liability rules. [emphasis added]

If Neely was being “ironic” here, he forgot to tell Congress.

Of course, anyone who has read the book already knows that Neely was not being ironic. The only people who could suggest otherwise are either ignorant (because they have not read the book, as in the case of Justinian, who, as is his wont, made wild-eyed allegations without getting his facts straight) or, if they have read the book… well, judge for yourself why someone would falsely suggest that a straight statement was ironic. The question remains how a SMU law professor would make such a patently false claim in a law review article, or how such a claim survived fact-checking.

Separately: note that Neely’s argument remains unrebutted (even by the present-day plaintiffs’ lawyer Neely), and explains as well as anything else why federal preemption is absolutely necessary (and entirely consistent with Hamiltonian/Madisonian federalism) in the litigation over interstate commerce.

Richard Neely’s lack of irony (III) is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

I too have read The Product Liability Mess with minute attention, having written the Fortune magazine review of the book, which was among the more high-profile reviews it got. And Ted is right: the more context you supply for the quote from the rest of the book, the less doubt you will harbor that it was meant straight, not ironically.

Since Neely’s statements in the book were almost electrifyingly frank, I can’t say I am surprised that he would later find it expedient to back off from and indeed disavow them; aside from changing his mind on matters of policy (at least I assume he’s changed his mind), and the exigencies of his later practice as a plaintiff’s lawyer, we all assumed at the time that in his judicial role he would come under enormous pressure for seemingly having admitted to deciding cases in a way many would regard as illegitimate.

It is remarkable that he would now speak of wanting to sell books as a motivation while simultaneously maintaining that the passages in question were meant to be taken ironically. It was precisely because the statements were not presented as kidding around that they foreseeably called wide attention to the book. (This is also in tension with Thornburg’s theory that Neely was critically describing other judges’ thought processes but not his own. I have to wonder whether she, like others who have taken up this matter recently, sat down and read the book.)

After my Fortune review was published I met and got to know Neely; we appeared on panel discussions together and shared many conversations. Without breaking any confidences about the private talk, I will only observe that at the public appearances we did, he had ample opportunity to state that he had just been kidding or merely ironic in the passages at issue, which figured so prominently in my Fortune review, but I do not recall his taking any such opportunity. I do not know, by the way, whether I am the nameless reviewer he unkindly calls a simpleton, but I have reason to doubt it, since he subsequently gave an extraordinarily favorable blurb to my book The Litigation Explosion, for which I continue to be grateful.

The whole thing is regrettable on a number of levels. I continue to think the books Neely wrote in his early career (“How Courts Govern America”, etc.) have much to recommend them both in substance and in their clear, pungent style, and for many reasons regret the loss of the career as public intellectual on which he had seemed to be well launched.

More on Neely, “The Product Liability Mess” is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

“As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me. ”

— Richard Neely, Justice, West Virginia Supreme Court, The Product Liability Mess at 4

In his latest attack on Overlawyered, Justinian Lane claims that Walter Olson and I have misused this quote, because Justice Neely was being “ironic.”

I’m holding The Product Liability Mess in front of me, and Neely is most certainly not being “ironic”: he is offering a mea culpa. Here’s the full paragraph (emphasis added), to show that it’s not being taken out of context:

The anarchy that current prevails among American state jurisdictions absolutely guarantees politically that no line of any sort will be drawn. After all, I’m not the only appellate judge who wants to sleep at night. As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so. Not only is my sleep enhanced when I give someone else’s money away, but so is my job security, because the in-state plaintiffs, their families and their friends will re-elect me. ”

And from the very first page:

[U]p to this very moment in my life I have been part of the problem rather than part of the solution. As a state court judge, much of my time is devoted to designing elaborate new ways to make business pay for everyone else’s bad luck.”

And here’s one more quote from pp. 70-72, with Neely talking about a specific West Virginia case, again emphasis added:

From what I know about myself and my colleagues, I have the distinct impression that in a product liability case the vote would have been 3 to 2 the other way, and the whole $10 million judgment would have been sustained. Had a defective Ford automobile killed the little boy, even I would have had none of the enthusiasm for reducing the judgment that I had when the judgment against the defendants would affect business and consumer costs in West Virginia. What do I care about the Ford Motor Company? To my knowledge Ford employs no one in West Virginia in its manufacturing processes…

“The best that I can do, and I do it all the time, is make sure that my own state’s residents get more money out of Michigan than Michigan residents get out of us.”

That, dear readers, is not irony.

Neely goes on to argue for the need for federal preemption to solve the product liability problem to protect the American economy from judges like him. Justinian clearly never read the book before he made his personal attack.

Lane bases his argument on a few ipse dixit sentences from Elizabeth Thornburg’s advocacy piece in the West Virginia Law Review attacking the characterization of West Virginia as a judicial hellhole. Thornburg, whose citations cherry-pick studies favorable to her conclusions, while ignoring those that are not, largely ignores or elides the real reasons why reformers justly call West Virginia a judicial hellhole. For example, her paper does not mention State ex rel. Johnson & Johnson Corp. v. Karl, where two justices of the WV Supreme Court majority expressly adopted Neely’s point of view about redistribution from out-of-state corporations to local doctors, much less the Beck/Frank critique of the West Virginia Supreme Court’s decision in Karl. There are arguments about some anecdotes, but not about others. The paper doesn’t mention Trial Court Rule 26.01, reverse bifurcation in West Virginia, and the appalling violation of due process it creates. Her paper also dishonestly claims that the state’s “medical monitoring” jurisprudence is in the “mainstream,” which is most certainly not true, but is a claim that must be justified to falsify the reformer critique of the state’s justice system.

Lane demands a retraction, but he seems to be the one who needs to make a retraction of his erroneous claims. Given Justinian Lane‘s previous record, we doubt one is forthcoming.

“As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth…”: was Richard Neely being “ironic”? is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system

• Contrary to Neely’s claims, he was never “struck” from any case by any party.
• At least under NAF rules, a party cannot unilaterally select an arbitrator: the two sides must agree, or, in the alternative, each select an arbitrator who will in turn mutually agree upon a third arbitrator. (Code of Procedure Rule 21.) Parties can strike an arbitrator for bias—for example, perhaps one of the arbitrators has announced that a class of parties are “godless bloodsuckers.” But this right applies equally to consumers and merchants.
• Neely claimed incorrectly that a party defaulting could be liable for more than they would under the civil justice system. But arbitration participants have more procedural protections in the case of default than those operating in the civil justice system–there is no “default” in arbitration. Rather, the arbitrator has to decide the case on the merits, even without the participation of the customer. Given the fact that the vast majority of debt collections in court are resolved by default, the typical consumer comes out far ahead in arbitration.
• Neely proposed a reform that arbitrators be required to disclose conflicts of interest. But arbitrators are already required to disclose such conflicts.

Read the whole thing. Neely (who ruled on the merits 100% of the time for banks against their customers in the two debt collection cases he decided) was apparently so upset by his experience that he signed a new agreement with NAF after the events he claims to describe transpired. One wonders: has the plaintiffs’ bar retained Neely as a consultant on the issue, and he decided he could make more money bad-mouthing arbitration than as an arbitrator? One will never know—unless Neely discloses his conflicts of interest.

Richard Neely’s previous claim to fame was stating, while Chief Justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, “As long as I am allowed to redistribute wealth from out-of-state companies to in-state plaintiffs, I shall continue to do so.” He’s had somewhat less success doing so as a plaintiffs’ attorney (June 2002).

Richard Neely and arbitration (and the godless bloodsuckers?) is a post from Overlawyered - Chronicling the high cost of our legal system