They didn’t tell me guest-blogging at Overlawyered would be an autopilot proposition, but thanks to James Taranto, it is — complete with a law professor to do the work for me:
The family of a woman killed trying to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home in 2003 asked a federal appeals court panel to reinstate its lawsuit against Caterpillar Inc., saying the company knew bulldozers it sold to the Israeli government were being used to commit human rights violations.
“Caterpillar sold this product knowing — or it should have known — it would cause exactly this harm,” one of the family’s lawyers, Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky told the three judges from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.
Yes, a law professor is making this argument. Okay, a law professor who blogs at Huffington Post, but still? No, he’s not a new face; but he certainly remains a brazen one. For in our bizarro world, right is a very special kind of wrong — the promotion of violence (by the likes of Rachel Corrie) is peace;the sale of construction equipment (by Caterpillar) is murder; and fallacious legal argumentation is the product of one of the “the top 20 legal thinkers in America.”
This could be one even the Ninth gets right. Meanwhile,
Corrie’s parents said after the hearing that they have been carrying on their daughter’s work since she died.
“You can’t go back to the way things were before, so you determine a path forward,” Cindy Corrie said.
I thought that’s exactly what they were suing over!
17 Comments
We’ve covered earlier phases of this case, by the way, here and here.
Does anyone want to take a guess as to what Chemerinsky’s take was on the Duke rape matter?
z0l0ft: That was my first thought as well.
Can’t tell what his attitude toward the lacrosse debacle was. He is not on the “Group of 88” list.
Catterpillar should agressively countersue everyone down to the company that made the paper the complaint was written on. Nice guy don’t hack it.
What is it about lawyers who live within a stone’s throw of Duke University?
First off, the late Ms. Corrie was anything but peaceful, and there is far too much video for her parents to claim otherwise (although that never stopped them in the past).
My take on the matter is this. if you inject yourself into a situation where tensions are heated and (more importantly) you’re dumb enough to step in front of a multi-ton machine that is in the process of “normal operation” (regardless of whether or not you agree with how that operation is carried out), then you have to take some responsibility for your actions.
Simply put, what would a reasonable person’s actions have been? To jump in front of a heavy construction vehicle as a means of political protest? Probably not.
Standing in front of a bulldozer that’s being used to inflict collective punishment is “the promotion of violence”?
Ugh, I don’t know. It might not be. My post was about the Rachel Corrie situation, though.
My understanding is that was what she was doing when she was killed by the bulldozer, see, e.g., the IHT article to which you link:
Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old peace activist from Olympia, Washington, was crushed by a 60-ton Israeli bulldozer as she stood before a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip.
You say “the promotion of violence (by the likes of Rachel Corrie)” – I was wondering what you were using to support that statement as the only thing I see linked in your post that says what she did was what the IHT describes.
And note that Chemerinsky was arguing that Caterpiller knew Israel was using the bulldozers for the purpose of demolishing homes, not that they knew they were using them to commit murder, which seems much more likely to me.
Ugh – Miss Corrie was trying to prevent the Israelis from destroying tunnels used by the Palestinian Arabs to smuggle bombs and weapons. Now, granted, she wasn’t carrying bombs herself, but to my way of thinking, her actions constituted what we lawyers would call “aiding and abetting” terrorism.
Um, this is a really, really lazy piece of ad hominem non-argument. You’re obviously just using the weakness of the legal arguments made here as a pretext to tee off on “liberals.” Shame.
Free cluster bombs for Israel, no liability, bulldozer manufacturers get sued? As much as I oppose the US funded occupation and other war crimes commited by Israel this is absurd.
Guest, “um,” you’re no more “arguing” your case than I am, though you seem actually to agree with me about the preposterousness of the argument, as does Amsterdamsky despite his obvious hangups (“war crimes”). But let me grant your point for argument’s sake and say this: these legal arguments are not only weak, as you acknowledge; they represent a fundamental moral void — not as to the Rachel Corrie angle, but as to the attempted use and abuse of the courts, in the most cynical way, to attempt to make political statements — and that, not politics itself (even my, morally correct political views, as opposed to your patently wrong ones — 😉 ) — is one point of this blog and the main point of this post.
That all makes a ton of sense. And I definitely agree that using the courts to make political points is bad news (although I strongly suspect that me and you would differ on where that line should be drawn).
But that’s not the post you published. And I didn’t have to make much of an argument – you included a bunch of stuff in your post that was just obvious partisanship and had nothing to do with the point you were making, and I pointed this out. So I was just gathering low-hanging fruit 🙂
And I says so’s your old man, Guest!
🙂 I like arguing with you, we should do it more often!
Ron, I like you and all… but if you’re going to accuse someone of a bizarro world suit, let he who is without frivolity cast the first Rule 11 zippity doo dah.
Hi, Marc. It was a breach of contract case, fundamentally. If you read the answer, you will see that far more is admitted than is denied. I don’t see the frivolousness of it all.v– RDC