Madison County: Gordon Maag, the trial-lawyer-backed candidate who last month was defeated in a race for the Illinois Supreme Court in what is said to have been the most expensive judicial race in American history, has filed a $100 million defamation suit against an arm of the Illinois Chamber of Commerce for saying bad things about him during the recent campaign. (St. Louis Post-Dispatch/Edwardsville Intelligencer/Southern Illinoisan/Illinois Leader). Jim Copland comments at Point Of Law. For two other widely noted efforts by Madison County lawyers to silence or intimidate their critics, see Nov. 4 and Nov. 30, 1999 and Feb. 29, 2000 (class action lawyers sue Post-Dispatch columnist Bill McClellan for making fun of them) and Jun. 9, Jul. 12, Jul. 26, 2003 (dragging national tort reform groups to court). For efforts to suppress the airing of ads affecting the Maag-Karmeier race, see Oct. 27. For other watch-what-you-say-about-lawyers cases, see Mar. 16 and Nov. 15, 2004, Nov. 30, 2003, and earlier posts; and Point of Law, Oct. 25 and Dec. 22, 2004.
More: plenty more coverage of the suit from Madison County plaintiff’s lawyer Evan Schaeffer, who defends Maag at his Notes from the Legal Underground (Dec. 23, with extensive comments section) and from a newly formed weblog published by the pro-reform Illinois Civil Justice League (Dec. 23, and scroll to other entries). As Ted noted in this space Oct. 27, both sides in the Maag-Karmeier race engaged in mudslinging and both were “reprimanded by the Illinois State Bar Association for misleading attack ads criticizing each other’s records in individual criminal cases”. The reformer-backed Madison County Record, which covered the defamation suit Dec. 20, on Dec. 15 quoted Rex Carr, the attorney who’s representing Maag in the defamation claim, as calling the American Tort Reform Association “drunks and dopeheads”. Sounds like just the sort of attorney you’d want to hire if you were suing someone for defamation!
Yet more: At Point of Law, Jim Copland has a lengthy post replying to Evan Schaeffer. Update Feb. 6, 2006 (state court judge dismisses suit for second time)
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What trial lawyers think
Yesterday, I noted (see also back links there) that Gordon Maag, the sore loser in Illinois’s Supreme Court race — the most expensive judicial race in American history — has filed suit against the Illinois State Chamber of Commerce and…
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Update: Gordon Maag libel suit dismissed
A Sangamon County judge threw out the former judge’s libel suit against his political opponents (Dec. 21, Dec. 23, Dec. 23 Overlawyered, Dec. 24, Dec. 24, Dec. 28). Judge Maag and his attorney, Rex Carr, did not comment. (Paul Hampel,…
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Watch what you say about lawyers, cont’d
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