Aides to candidates Clinton and Obama feverishly work an AAJ/ATLA trial lawyers’ conclave down Puerto Rico way, sensing that the money behind the flagging John Edwards candidacy may be “looking for a new candidate to get behind”. It’s “a testament to the crucial role played by the legal profession in Democratic fundraising. Trial lawyers have proved to be the financial mainstay for Edwards’s two presidential bids, as well as for the Democratic Party in general.” Quotes longtime Overlawyered favorites Fred Baron, Thomas Girardi and Robert Montgomery (Matthew Mosk, “Top Candidates’ Teams Look to the Lawyers”, Washington Post, Jan. 28).
Posts Tagged ‘politics’
Why are so many politicians lawyers?
Tyler Cowen wonders, and his readers chime in with many of the obvious theories, as well as some not so obvious (Marginal Revolution and Volokh).
Edwards to be AG in Obama administration?
So suggests Robert Novak, which, if true, puts to question any claims Obama has for being a different kind of Democrat. One wonders how long the prosecutions of Mel Weiss, Dickie Scruggs, or the Kentucky fen-phen lawyers would last. Of course, one recalls, the Clinton administration wasn’t any better when it buried a prosecution of Fred Baron in the Baron & Budd script memo scandal. Baron, who was the head of the ATLA trial-lawyer lobbying organization, is now Edwards’s finance chair, though the media has yet to note this hypocrisy by the supposedly anti-lobbyist Edwards.
Corzine vetoes unlimited noneconomic damages
Who says we never praise Democrats? Via Scheuerman, New Jersey’s Democratic governor Jon Corzine has vetoed a law that would have created unlimited noneconomic damages in wrongful death cases:
“[U]nlimited damages … could have a significant impact on state and local budgets, since government entities are not infrequently named as defendants in wrongful death suits, and there are similar concerns as the State undertakes efforts to attract and grow businesses here.”
“Unfortunately, I do not believe that this bill in its current form strikes a fair balance that would avoid using a strict monetary valuation of a person’s life while also addressing the adverse effect of allowing unlimited and unpredictable damages.”
He urged the Legislature to consider alternatives “granting more flexibility for courts to reduce excessive non-pecuniary damage awards and defining non-pecuniary damages less expansively.”
[NJ Law Journal/law.com; earlier: Jan. 9]
More about Joseph (“Joey”) Langston, part II
As a number of commentators have noted (e.g. Brett Kittredge @ Majority in Mississippi, Alan Lange @ YallPolitics), Booneville attorney Joey Langston, who just entered a guilty plea on charges of judicial corruption, is someone accustomed to throwing the weight of his pocketbook around in Mississippi politics. In particular, he has been among the biggest donors to incumbent Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood, even as Hood employed Langston and partner Tim Balducci on contract to handle the controversial MCI tax bill negotiations, with their resulting $14 million legal fees payable to Langston et al, and the potentially very lucrative Zyprexa litigation.
Equally interesting in some ways, however, are Langston’s activities on the national political scene. To take just one example: this CampaignMoney.com listing tabulates the top “527” contributions to a group called the Democratic Attorneys General Association, whose political and electoral mission is implied by its name. In the listing, two donors are tied for first place, with contributions of $100,000 apiece. One is the large Cincinnati law firm of Waite Schneider Bayless Chesley, associated with one of the country’s best-known plaintiff’s lawyers, Stanley Chesley. The other $100,000 contribution is from Joey Langston.
In presidential politics, Langston has recently been a repeat donor to the quixotic (and, since Iowa, defunct) campaign of Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), a lawmaker whose high degree of seniority on the Senate Judiciary Committee makes him important to ambitious lawyers whether or not he ever attains the White House. When the Scruggs scandal was still in its early stages, the WSJ law blog (Dec. 10) noted that two key figures in the affair, Tim Balducci and Steve Patterson, were strong backers of the Biden campaign: “Their bet on Biden was that he wouldn’t win the presidency but would become Secretary of State under a Hillary Clinton administration, according to two people familiar with their thinking.” The Journal reprinted (PDF) an invitation to an Aug. 10, 2007 fundraising reception for Biden at the Oxford (Miss.) University Club, sent out above the names of six hosts, three of whom (Scruggs, Balducci and Patterson) were soon indicted. Scruggs, of course, is better known for his support of Mrs. Clinton, a fundraiser for whom he had to cancel after the scandal broke.
Campaign-contributions databases such as OpenSecrets.org and NewsMeat indicate that Langston has been a prolific and generous donor to incumbent and aspiring Senators across the country, mostly Democrats (Murray, Cantwell, Daschle, Nelson, etc.) but also including a number of Republicans who might be perceived as swing votes or reachable, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Susan Collins (Me.), and Arlen Specter (Penn.)
Incidentally, some critics have intimated that Langston’s generous support to DAGA, the Democratic Attorneys General Association, should actually be interpreted as a roundabout gift to Hood, who was the beneficiary of interestingly timed largesse from DAGA. It does not appear, however, that any of the parties involved — Langston, Hood or DAGA — have acknowledged any connection between the timing of the donations (& welcome Michelle Malkin, David Rossmiller, YallPolitics readers).
[Second of a two-part post. The first part is here.]
OT: on the Ron Paul phenomenon
I’ve been speaking up against Ron Paul privately amongst my libertarian friends in DC, and now I’m mad at myself that I wasn’t doing so more publicly before the “revelations” of the open secret.
White House race roundup
- Marie Gryphon rounds up what’s known about the Republican candidates and their views on litigation reform [Point of Law]
- Obama’s signature achievement as an Illinois legislator was a law requiring that police videotape interrogations and confessions, the better to protect both suspects from beatings and cops from false charges of abuse; some “death penalty abolitionists … worried that Obama’s bill, by preventing the execution of innocents, would deprive them of their best argument” (!). [Peters/WaPo]
- Giuliani-bashers had a fine old time hammering the former mayor on supposed scandal over girlfriend’s driver. So was there anything there? [NYTimes, Newsday “Spin Cycle”, Frum; standard disclaimer]
- Edwards has resolved to run as a plaintiff’s lawyer in full jury-stirring mode; we know a fair bit about his trial-winning style, less about how he settles cases [Beldar]
- Quite a few adherents of the scary Christian Reconstructionist movement seem to like Gov. Huckabee a lot, one hopes he doesn’t like them back [Lindsey, Cato-at-Liberty; Box Turtle Bulletin]
“That’s why I didn’t become a trial lawyer”
Democratic front-runner (if it’s okay to call him that now) Barack Obama tells a Newton, Iowa audience about his early decisions to pursue civil rights, community organizing and public office rather than more lucrative legal specialties, and is blasted in parts of the lefty blogosphere for the implied dig at John Edwards. (Shailagh Murray, Washington Post “The Trail”, Dec. 30; Kos, TPM, Kia Franklin, etc.) Per the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, “Obama is starting to use the term ‘trial lawyer’ more often on the stump to describe Edwards, perhaps hoping to capitalize on the negative associations many voters have with that particular profession.” (“The Trail”, Dec. 31).
P.S. Some highlights of our earlier Obama coverage: Aug. 5, 2004 (“Anyone who denies there’s a crisis with medical malpractice insurance is probably a trial lawyer”); Apr. 10, 2007 (making inroads nonetheless on Edwards’ trial-lawyer donor base; per Legal Times, “Despite Obama’s silence on the issues trial lawyers care about, those who support him say they are confident he will back trial lawyers when the time comes”); Jul. 31 and Aug. 5 (auditions at AAJ/ATLA convention). P.P.S. Plus Ted at Point of Law a year back (“far from convinced” that Obama will cross the trial bar, despite his vote for the Class Action Fairness Act).
Fewer lawyers in Virginia legislature
Glenn Lewis, president of the Virginia Bar Association, thinks it’s a bad thing that there are only 29 lawyers in the commonwealth’s 100-member House of Delegates (and 16 in its 40-member Senate). In the “President’s Page” column of the association’s magazine, the VBA News Journal, he recently argued that the Old Dominion suffers from “a dearth of lawyer-legislators” to which he attributes such ills as “wrong-minded analyses” as well as shortcomings in drafting. He believes lawyers should hold at least half the seats in the legislature. Despite a marked decline in its percentage of lawyer/legislators, Virginia still well exceeds the national average of 17 percent. (Laurence Hammack, “Fewer lawyers make Virginia’s laws”, Roanoke Times, Dec. 30).
Of course, one possibility is that lawyers do on average bring with them a superior skill set on issues of legislation and governance, but that the voting public no longer trusts the independence of their judgment and their allegiance to the general good as it once did, fearing that they will instead advance the interest of organized factions, perhaps including the self-interest of the legal profession itself.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and trial lawyer earmarks are “consumer-friendly”
The Consumerist blog is supposed to be a pro-consumer blog, but it’s amazing how often their political agenda is really a trial-lawyer agenda that hurts consumers. Many of the 2007 bills Carey Greenberg highlights as consumer-friendly are quite the opposite:
- H.R. 3010: Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007
What It Does: Raises costs to and reduces choices for consumers and lowers employee wages by forcing consumers and employees to pass up the benefits of mandatory arbitration, whether they wish to or not. More at Overlawyered, and on SSRN.
Status: Hearings held in both the House and Senate. Likely to be vetoed if passed.