“While no one tracks the number of legal notices broadcasters receive on political ads, station managers and lawyers say attempts to block ads are growing both in number and intensity, particularly in states with closely contested elections. … While some stations buckle under the pressure and drop the ads, most refuse.” (Sarah McBride, “Campaigns Pressure Stations Over ‘527′ Ads”, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 26). More: Jesse Walker, Reason “Hit and Run” (NRA ads in Pennsylvania); Eugene Volokh (Missouri “truth squad” controversy).

• One for your “firefighter’s rule” file: firefighter perishes in blaze, his widow sues security alarm company [SF Chron, San Pablo, Calif.]
• And another: Nassau County, N.Y. cop injured by drunk driver while on duty is suing the county over Long Island Expressway design and signage [Newsday; Kenneth Baribault]
• Stop fighting over the $60 million in fees, judge tells feuding lawyers, your lawsuit has been over for four years now [Legal Intelligencer, corrugated paper antitrust class action]
• Public-health prof: red-light cameras “don’t work” and instead “increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop” [Bruce Schneier via Instapundit]
• Criminal prosecution of political attack ads? Time to rethink campaign finance law [Bainbridge]
• Teenagers send each other racy cellphone videos, and then their legal nightmare begins [Des Moines Register]
• Sounds interesting but haven’t seen a copy: “How To Get Sued: An Instructional Guide” by well-known blawger J. Craig Williams [Giacalone, Ambrogi]
• Mississippi AG Hood goes after MillerCoors over caffeinated alcohol drinks, but Anheuser-Busch hired Mike Moore and sprung big for DAGA, hmmm [Alan Lange, YallPolitics]/li>

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.)

Continue Reading »

Baron grants an interview to the Texas Lawyer, and makes some implausible claims:

Continue Reading »

Where’s the trial lawyer bringing a class action on behalf of all of the people who were defrauded when they gave money to John Edwards’s presidential campaign?  It’s certainly a much more plausible claim of causation, reliance, and financial injury than the typical class action.

More seriously, I hope someone somewhere is investigating whether Fred Baron violated federal campaign finance law when he set aside tens of thousands of dollars to pay Rielle Hunter hush money without disclosing the payments on behalf of Edwards.  Edwards said he was in the Beverly Hilton to help keep the story from becoming public, which makes it seem unlikely he’s telling the truth when he said that he had no knowledge that Baron moved Hunter to California.  Alas, ABC didn’t ask the right follow-up questions, such as how Edwards thought meeting Hunter in a hotel room would help keep the story quiet.  And “Fred Baron” appears nowhere in the New York Times story, even as he is a major fund-raiser for Barack Obama today.  Obama is still running for president, right?

Big-league Arkansas trial lawyer Tab Turner did it, and was fined $9,500. Big-league Michigan trial lawyer Geoffrey Fieger did it, and managed to beat the rap at his recent trial. And now we learn that big-league California trial lawyer Pierce O’Donnell did it too: evaded limits on campaign contributions to John Edwards by reimbursing underlings to enable them to contribute. Would it be simpler to compile a list of the big Edwards backers who did obey the law? (WSJ law blog, Jul. 24). More on Edwards campaign finance shenanigans here.

Update Jul. 25, NLJ: O’Donnell indicted, based on a separate episode of laundering of contributions (to Los Angeles mayoral campaign of James Hahn).

Detroit’s liberal newspaper voice, which supports extending campaign finance law, has this to say in an editorial:

…There is no doubt that Southfield attorney Geoffrey Fieger completely subverted [the aims of campaign law] when he essentially laundered through employees of his law firm hefty contributions to the 2004 presidential campaign of John Edwards.

But can you make a federal case out of it? A U.S. District Court jury didn’t think so, refusing Monday to convict Fieger and law partner Vernon (Ven) Johnson of doing anything illegal. So congratulations to Fieger for gaming the system and then beating it.

But that doesn’t make what he did right. …

…the system ought to have some integrity, and the limits established by law ought to be enforced. Fieger got around them by being clever, pleading ignorance, then getting a jury to see it his way. It certainly helped that the local U.S. attorney’s office had been frighteningly aggressive in its pursuit of Fieger, and that he had the cash to hire an attorney who reputedly has never lost a case. Yes, money matters in criminal justice at least as much as it does in politics.

No doubt, Fieger’s acquittal gives a little more mettle to other fat cats who want to skirt the law. It’s a victory for him, but a step back for the political process.

Fieger himself has tried to put out the line that it is only because of some mean old plot against politically active trial lawyers that he was ever prosecuted at all. If the Free Press editorial is any indication, it doesn’t look as he’s getting very far with that line. More here and here.

Further: Scott Greenfield, and Freep reporter Dawson Bell (unless your name is Geoffrey Fieger, don’t try to get away with doing what he did: “It’s still a crime.”). Ted in comments adds: “And let’s not forget the all-too-typical and appalling sight of the defendant partying with the jurors he snookered.” Per the account in the Free Press, “Champagne sat on ice at each table” in the Greektown establishment. “A stocked bar was in the corner.” Earlier on post-trial juror fraternization with winning disputants and their lawyers here, here, etc.

Terry Carter in the ABA Journal has more on the legal background:

The straw-donor law invoked against Fieger has been around since 1972, though Congress upped the ante and made it a felony as part of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as the McCain-Feingold Act. In all these years there has been but one jury verdict concerning the law, before it was a felony, and it was for acquittal. (There have been several plea agreements in recent years.)

Thus no court has crafted an opinion concerning the law itself, according to some of the few experts in this narrow slice of election law.

Spence told the jury that the government tried to use snippets of law to go after Fieger, a prominent plaintiffs lawyer and former Democratic candidate for governor in Michigan, for political purposes. The campaign finance law (2 U.S.C. § 441f) says:

“No person shall make a contribution in the name of another person or knowingly permit his name to be used to effect such a contribution, and no person shall knowingly accept a contribution made by one person in the name of another person.”

The defense argued that the law, as worded, does not prohibit reimbursing people who make contributions.

If in fact Fieger’s acquittal will be cited in favor of the notion that the use of straw donors reimbursed after the fact is lawful after all, that might seem to blow a rather large hole in the side of the McCain-Feingold law — which makes it all the odder that the Fieger trial drew so little attention from either backers or critics of that law on the national level.

All those reimbursements of employees who donated to John Edwards? Just one vast coincidence, not a purposeful way of evading federal campaign finance laws. Now that the verdict’s in, could we please repeal the campaign finance laws in question ASAP, before some less lucky soul tries the same thing and gets sentenced to time in the slammer because his name isn’t Geoffrey Fieger and his lawyer isn’t Gerry Spence? (David Ashenfelter and Joe Swickard, “Fieger, law partner acquitted of illegal political donations”, Detroit Free Press, Jun. 2).

• Easterbrook: “One who misuses litigation to obtain money to which he is not entitled is hardly in a position to insist that the court now proceed to address his legitimate claims, if any there are…. Plaintiffs have behaved like a pack of weasels and can’t expect any part of their tale be believed.” [Ridge Chrysler v. Daimler Chrysler via Decision of the Day]
• Retail stores and their lawyers find sending scare letters with implausible threats of litigation against accused shoplifters mildly profitable. [WSJ]
• Kentucky exploring ways to reform mass-tort litigation in wake of fen-phen scandal. [Mass Tort Prof; Torts Prof; AP/Herald-Dispatch; earlier: Frank @ American]
• After Posner opinion, expert should be looking for other lines of work. [Kirkendall; Emerald Investments v. Allmerica Financial Life Insurance & Annuity]
• Judge reduces jury verdict in Premarin & Prempro case to “only” $58 million. And I still haven’t seen anyone explain why it makes sense for a judge to decide damages awards were “the result of passion and prejudice,” but uphold a liability finding from the same impassioned and prejudiced jury. Wyeth will appeal. [W$J via Burch; AP/Business Week]
• Judge lets lawyers get to private MySpace and Facebook postings. [OnPoint; also Feb. 19]
• Nanny staters’ implausible case for regulating salt. [Sara Wexler @ American; earlier: Nov. 2002]
• Doctor: usually it’s cheaper to pay than to go to court. [GNIF BrainBlogger]
• Trial lawyers in Colorado move to eviscerate non-economic damages cap in malpractice cases [Rocky Mountain News]
• Bonin: don’t regulate free speech on the Internet in the name of “campaign finance” [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• “Executives face greater risks—but investors are no safer.” [City Journal]
• Professors discuss adverse ripple effects from law school affirmative action without mentioning affirmative action. Paging Richard Sander. Note also the absence of “disparate impact” from the discussion. [PrawfsBlawg; Blackprof]
• ATL commenters debate my American piece on Edwards. [Above the Law]

McCain-Feingold is based on the premise that money used to purchase speech distorts the political process because candidates can use money to fool voters, and therefore the speech purchased by money must be regulated. First Amendment limitations that not even the O’Connor Court was willing to override, however, prevented McCain-Feingold from reaching the spending of personal funds to self-promote. Thus, multi-millionaire Mitt Romney, because he was able to spend millions of dollars of his own money to promote his message would, according to the premises of McCain-Feingold, prevent candidates without those millions from winning elections. If those premises are correct. Which is why John McCain’s decisive victory yesterday is simultaneously a decisive repudiation of the campaign finance law he is most known for.

Continue Reading »

Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Tom Harkin (D-Ia.), Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) have teamed up to co-sponsor a proposed constitutional amendment that “would overturn U.S. Supreme Court decisions that limit Congress’ power to regulate the funding of political campaigns. … the amendment would repeal the 1st Amendment as it relates to campaign finance. This would be the first time in our history that we altered the Constitution to curtail liberties protected by the Bill of Rights. It would also have the effect, not accidental, of protecting incumbent members of Congress from being unseated at the polls.” (Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune/syndicated, Oct. 28).

P.S. Then there’s the possibility that the talk-radio-stifling Fairness Doctrine will be reintroduced in 2009 or after (John Fund, OpinionJournal.com, Oct. 29). And while “Crooked Timber” may be a pleasantly evocative name for a weblog, would arch-liberal Isaiah Berlin really have been so keen to use the state’s coercive power against unwanted speech? (Sullivan, Bainbridge)(& welcome Salon Blog Report readers).

• Lawyer for Mothers Against Drunk Driving: better not call yourself Mothers Against Anything Else without our say-so [Phoenix New Times]
• Ohio insurer agrees to refund $51 million in premiums, but it’s a mutual, so money’s more or less moving from customers’ left to right pockets — except for a big chunk payable to charity, and $16 million to you-know-who [Business First of Columbus; Grange Mutual Casualty]
• Sources say Judge Pearson, of pants suit fame, isn’t getting reappointed to his D.C. administrative law judge post [WaPo]
• Between tighter safety rules and rising liability costs, more British towns are having to do without Christmas light displays [Telegraph]
• So strong are the incentives to settle class-action securities suits that only four have been tried to a verdict in past twelve years [WSJ law blog]. More: D&O Diary.
• It’s so cute when a family’s small kids all max out at exactly the same $2,300 donation to a candidate, like when they dress in matching outfits or something [WaPo via Althouse]
• Idea of SueEasy.com website for potential injury plaintiffs [Oct. 19] deemed “incredibly stupid” [Turkewitz]
• New at Point of Law: med-mal reports from Texas and Colorado; Lynne-Stewart-at-Hofstra wrap-up (more); immune to reason on vaccines; turning tax informants into bounty-hunters?; and much more;
• $800,000 race-bias suit filed after restaurant declines to provide free extra lemons with water [Madison County Record]
• Settling disabled-rights suit, biggest card banking network agrees to install voice-guidance systems on 30,000 ATMs to assist blind customers [NFB]
• Think twice before publishing “ratings” of Pennsylvania judges [six years ago on Overlawyered]

Free speech survives intact: the Washington Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that radio talk show hosts’ urging of listeners to support a ballot measure does not constitute a “contribution” to the yes side for purposes of mandatory reporting under campaign finance law. (Ryan Sager, New York Sun blog, Apr. 26). We covered the charges against KVI hosts Kirby Wilbur and John Carlson Jul. 11 and Jul. 19, 2005. Eugene Volokh has extensive coverage of the new decision. A concurring opinion by Justice James M. Johnson, joined by Justice Richard B. Sanders, terms the enforcement a case of “abusive prosecution”. More: Michelle Malkin; John Fund, OpinionJournal.com, Apr. 30.

• Bill Moyers calls his lawyers. [Adler @ Volokh]
• Jim Copland: 9/11 suits against New York City over emergency recovery work “simply wrong.” [New York Post]
• Did the PSLRA help shareholders? [Point of Law]
• 32-year-old Oregon grocery store employee sues, claiming that Green Day stole his never-recorded high-school writings. [Above the Law]
• Does one assume the risk of a broken nose if one agrees to a sparring match at a karate school? [TortsProf]
• “At KFC (né Kentucky Fried Chicken), the chicken is still fried. At Altria (né Philip Morris), the cigarettes still cause cancer. And at the American Association for Justice, some will say that the trial lawyers are still chasing ambulances.” [New York Times via Point of Law]
• More on global warming lawsuits. [Point of Law]
• Dahlia Lithwick, wrong again when bashing conservatives? Quelle surprise! [Ponnuru @ Bench Memos; see also Kaus] Earlier: POL Oct. 6 and links therein. Best commentary on New Jersey gay marriage decision is at Volokh.
• Michael Dimino asks for examples of frivolous lawsuits. What’s the over-under until it turns into a debate over the McDonald’s coffee case? [Prawfsblawg]
• Unintended consequences of campaign finance reform. [Zywicki @ Volokh; Washington Times]
• Who’s your least favorite Supreme Court justice? [Above the Law]
• More on Borat and the law. [Slate] Earlier on OL: Dec. 9 and links therein.
• “Thrilled Juror Feels Like Murder Trial Being Put On Just For Her.” [Onion]
• A revealing post by the Milberg Weiss Fellow at DMI: companies make “too much” profit. I respond: “Again, if you really think the problem is that insurance companies charge ‘too much’ and make ‘too much’ money, then the profitable solution is to take advantage of this opportunity and open a competing insurance company that charges less instead of whining about it. (Or, you could use a fraction of the profits to hire a dozen bloggers and thus solve the problem at the same time keeping the whining constant.)” [Dugger]

“By demanding that the speech of two talk-radio hosts be monetized and strictly limited, reformers reveal the next stage in their stealthy repeal of the First Amendment.” (”Sleepless in Seattle”, Newsweek, Oct. 9). Earlier coverage: Jul. 11 and Jul. 19, 2005.

“As of Friday, when the 60-day blackout period for ‘electioneering communications’ by nonprofit interest groups begins, political speech will enjoy less protection than dirty movies. While a sexually explicit film is protected by the First Amendment if it has some socially redeeming value, an ‘electioneering communication’ is forbidden even if it deals with important and timely public policy issues.” (Jacob Sullum, syndicated/Reason.com, Sept. 6).

How unprincipled can one party get? (George Will, “The GOP’s Betrayal on Speech”, syndicated/Washington Post, Apr. 16)(via Coyote).