Quin Hillyer

Does the U.S. have too many rules, too many ‘rights’?

We Americans need to implement a “legal revolution, clearing out decades of accumulated law and bureaucracy.” So writes celebrated lawyer/author Philip K. Howard in his latest provocative book, “Life Without Lawyers,” an impassioned call to overthrow the “false idea that law and rights can substitute for human judgment in daily dealings.” Howard says we need fewer lawsuits and more common sense. Fewer rules and more personal responsibility. Less caution and more decisiveness. Fewer “rights,” but greater freedom. Too Many Laws, Too Many Lawyers...

Continued...

 

‘Bureaucracy Can’t Teach’: Why American schools often fail

Philip K. Howard is most well-known for being an advocate of lawsuit reform, but he spends a surpassingly large portion of his latest book on improving the American education system. His central message is well-captured in the title of the book’s Chapter 5 (also the headline of this news story): “Bureaucracy Can’t Teach.” Too Many Laws, Too Many Lawyers - Does America have too many rules and "rights?" - Lawyers' donations make them influential in Congress - Government laws build up with little examination of prior ones - How...

Continued...

 

Money talks: Lawyers’ cash equals legislative power

Most of Philip K. Howard’s “Life Without Lawyers” is focused less on rogue lawyers than it is on the laws and rules that provide fertile ground for those lawyers to operate. Still, Howard doesn’t ignore the fact that many of those laws are written by legislators deeply beholden to rapacious lawyers who finance their campaigns. Too Many Laws, Too Many Lawyers - Does America have too many rules and "rights?" - Lawyers' donations make them influential in Congress - Government laws build up with little examination of prior ones - How...

Continued...

 

Emanuel’s story line is fishy

White House Chief of Staff and partisan hit-man-in-chief Rahm Emanuel wouldn’t know a real idea if was served up to him on a fish platter. On ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Emanuel had this to say about President Barack Obama’s critics on the right: “When you're the party of no, when you're the party of never, when you're the party of no new ideas, that's not constructive…. The challenge will be: Will the Republicans come to the table with constructive ideas?” Emanuel, a foul-mouthed would-be tough guy best known for having sent a decomposing 30-inch fish to a pollster he didn’t like, clearly doesn’t even want to pay attention...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Too much foreign law over-riding U.S. law

No government is truly legitimate unless its authority rests upon the freely determined consent of the governed. That concept is the most basic lesson we learn in grade-school civics classes. Yet that ideal now is threatened as never before in American history, under the guise of “respect” for international opinion. Three news items in the last two weeks show how Americans are threatened with the imposition of foreign law over American law. These threats are an assault on our sovereignty, and on our freedom. The first item is the controversy over President Barack Obama’s nomination of Yale Law Dean Harold Koh to be chief counsel for the State Department. Koh is...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Kids can still learn about government's limits

Our young adults don’t understand much about American government because we don’t teach them about American government. Or at least we don’t teach them well enough for them to care about it. About once each year, a group, usually the essential Intercollegiate Studies Institute, publishes the results of a new survey showing just how few students, even at elite colleges, know the most essential information about American civics and history. An impressive outfit called the Bill of Rights Institute is working to change that, at the high school level, through “instructional material and educational programs on America's Founding documents and principles.”...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Judges shouldn’t be tax men

Americans rightly recoil at the idea of judges imposing taxes or forcing legislatures to spend tax dollars. So how can a federal district court order the state of Arizona to spend more of its taxpayer dollars than the state legislature desires on educational matters usually left to state discretion when the same legislature already is in full compliance with the educational standards set by Congress? On April 20, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Horne v. Flores, in which the federal district court has run roughshod over the state’s elected lawmakers. The controversy involves Arizona’s “English Language Learner” (ELL) program....

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases:Why can't we decline Medicare benefits?

Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for D.C. last week was given a chance to strike a major blow for freedom from bureaucratic idiocy. Every American taxpayer, along with every citizen who wants to make his own decisions on health care, should hope Judge Collyer brings the bureaucracy to heel. This column first covered this case, Brian Hall v. Charles E. Johnson, last October. The five plaintiffs, who now include former House Majority leader Dick Armey, are challenging a policy of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) that denies Social Security benefits to anybody who refuses to enroll in Medicare. Read that again: As the policy now stands, if you want to pay...

Continued...

 

Obama and his judges should both be humble

When it comes time for President Barack Obama to nominate federal appellate judges, he ought to seek humility in his nominees and show some humility himself. In essence, that was the advice last week of a philosophically diverse trio of legal experts at a forum sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. Those experts are correct. The American people do not like activist, leftist judges. If Obama tries to stack the court with such nominees, he risks alienating the broad middle of the electorate that gave him his presidential victory margin. Heritage is, of course, a conservative outfit, but it was the panel’s most liberal member who first struck the “humility” theme....

Continued...

 

Unions lose a battle but gain an argument

Labor unions have long tried to finagle government into awarding them compulsory powers even when workers object. On Feb. 24, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that government can refuse such union pressure. Many people by now have heard of the “card check” controversy about whether workers deserve secret ballots for union organizing elections. And most people have heard variations on the theme of whether a union can compel dues from unwilling workers. But the Feb. 24 case, Ysursa v. Pocatello Education Association, asked a slightly different question: Can unions force governments to be collection agents for union political activities? Common sense says no. Common...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential cases: Race, to the Court

Attorney General Eric Holder says that Americans are “cowards” who need a nationwide conversation on race. The Supreme Court soon will stimulate one. Last week, the high court received amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs in two racially charged cases and heard oral arguments in a third. In different ways, all three challenge the racial preferences that Holder consistently advocates. The first, most attention-grabbing case involves New Haven, Connecticut’s fire department, which carefully designed a race-neutral, competitive exam to choose captains and lieutenants. When only white candidates aced one particular set of exams, with no black...

Continued...

 

An Examiner Editorial Special Report:Trial lawyers’ lobbyists seeking special favors from Congress

Washington special interests don’t always need traditional pork barrel to get rich through congressional action. Brief or obscure provisions in bills that often run to hundreds of pages can do the trick just as well as a law directing a government check or contract to a favored recipient. That reality is what made so telling an observation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, regarding tense negotiations between her chamber and the U.S. Senate on the $787 billion economic stimulus package signed Tuesday by President Barack Obama. Pelosi said: “Around here language means a lot. Words weigh a ton…. We wanted to take all the time that was necessary to make sure it was...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Callous Congress just doesn't care

Most Members of Congress don’t care how individual provisions in the bills they pass actually affect individual citizens. They care about how the media portrays them, and about getting credit for items that affect their particular constituencies. And they care about how their favored lobbyists and campaign donors feel, and about how various interest groups will respond. But they don’t really care about voiceless individual citizens. If they did, they would make sure their staffs actually have time to analyze legislation to ward off any jokers in the deck. And they would ensure the public has time to weigh in before Members vote. But they don’t. Instead, once the...

Continued...

 

ABA policy could be horrible medicine

Why is the head of the American Bar Association - without a vote of its members - trying to overturn an 8-1 Supreme Court decision in a way that could bankrupt the clients of a lot of ABA members? And why should non-expert attorneys, judges and juries in the 50 states, and the District of Columbia, be asked to make highly technical judgments about the safety of medical devices that Food and Drug Administration (FDA) experts have already approved? These questions arise in response to letters from ABA president Tommy Wells to various congressional committee chairs late last year. Wells’ Dec. 29, 2008, letters supported legislation designed to reverse the Feb. 20, 2008 decision in...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Unleaded economy could fuel huge job losses

Folks often hear the exhortation to “get the lead out” when moving too slowly. But Congress’s over-hasty insistence on getting the lead out is about to cause massive economic problems in an already weak economy. The Manhattan Institute’s Walter Olson wrote Jan. 16 in Forbes that a new law, limiting lead content in consumer products, probably will be “a calamity for businesses and an epic failure of regulation, threatening to wipe out tens of thousands of small makers of children's items from coast to coast, and taking a particular toll on the handcrafted and creative, the small-production-run and sideline at-home business, not to mention struggling...

Continued...

 

Lawsuit reform progresses in states

While lawmakers in the nation’s capital do back flips kowtowing to plaintiffs’ lawyers who heavily finance their campaigns, individual states continue to move in the opposite direction to rein in lawsuit abuse by the plaintiffs’ bar. States repeatedly have found that reasonable limits on lawsuits help boost their economies and/or health-care systems, whereas unfettered jackpot justice is seriously detrimental. Major efforts at lawsuit reforms are underway in at least four states: Wyoming, Georgia, Oregon, and President Barack Obama’s home state of Hawaii. But in Congress, the plaintiffs’ bar is securing a huge windfall with the “sue anytime”...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: A chance to move beyond race

It was in the 2006 case of League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry that Chief Justice John Roberts gave us an appropriate thought to contemplate on this Inauguration Day. “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race,” he wrote. The Chief Justice was writing about race-based redrawing of legislative districts. His words, though, are instructive for a much broader societal context. Now that we are inaugurating an African-American to the highest office in the land, can we finally stop analyzing just about everything through the prism of race? Please? Once the United States has a black president, why does it matter if we swear in the first black attorney...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Libby should be pardoned on the merits

There is no good reason for President George W. Bush to have waited so long to pardon former vice presidential aide Lewis “Scooter” Libby. For Libby still to be twisting in the wind is unconscionable. Despite Libby’s conviction, there is ample reason to believe him innocent of perjury, and possibly not even guilty of a bad memory. Even if his memory was indeed faulty, the evidence of any intent to deceive was highly dubious. Meanwhile, he caused no harm to the overall investigation, no harm to the country, nor even any harm to the high-flying Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame couple whose own mendacity catalyzed the whole charade of a trial. Bush has one week left to pardon...

Continued...

 

Cheney defends interrogations, talks history in interview

In a luncheon round table interview today with a small group of conservative journalists, Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that “we don’t torture” but that “enhanced interrogation techniques” have “produced a wealth of information” that has protected the United States against terrorists – and, on a far more personal level, said that his four decades in public life have been a “helluva ride” that he is “seriously thinking” about recording in memoirs after he leaves office. Cheney refused to comment on whether he has advised President George W. Bush to pardon his former top aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby or...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential cases: Re-nominating Keisler would be change GOP can believe

For all of Barack Obama’s lofty talk about bipartisanship, the incoming president has yet to do anything of real substance on the domestic political front to lessen the Capitol’s partisan toxicity. One step, more than any other, would put substance behind his rhetoric - renominate former acting Attorney General Peter Keisler for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Keisler is a superbly qualified nominee (more on that later) who has been praised by legal experts and editorial boards across the political spectrum but has been treated extremely shabbily by Senate Democrats. There is excellent precedent for a president of one party re-nominating an...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Suit challenges U.S. Treasury funding of Islamic religion tax

Conservatives and other critics of the U.S. Treasury’s $700 billion Wall Street bailout argue it is based on flawed economics and represents an unconstitutional delegation of legislative powers to the executive branch. But the first major court challenge to the bailout involves neither of those arguments. Instead, now comes Iraq War veteran Kevin J. Murray arguing that part of the bailout creates an unconstitutional “establishment of religion.” In short, it violates the Constitution’s First Amendment. Murray’s suit in federal court was filed on his behalf by the Thomas More Law Center. How so? Murray notes that the Treasury took a 79.9 percent interest in...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Frivolous lawsuits harm real people

Imagine that you own a small air-conditioning business, with just two employees, both of whom had to miss work after the company truck they were driving was struck head-on by a driver who crossed the road’s center-line while traveling in the opposite direction. The police report clearly shows, in multiple places, that the other driver was at fault. Your truck was ruined. And although it was July in Jacksonville, Fla. – ordinarily quite a profitable time for an AC business – you lost money that month because you were short both employees and a truck. And then – after you’ve already taken a hit for something for which nobody in your employ was at fault...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: The perverse results of affirmative action

With the incoming president and first lady both being African-American graduates of elite law schools, it stands to reason that a host of aspiring black collegians would want to emulate their success. Counterintuitively, a member of the United States Commission on Civil Rights has written a paper suggesting that the best way to produce more black lawyers is to eliminate racial preferences at law schools, especially at elite law schools. Commissioner Gail Heriot, also a professor of law at the University of San Diego (USD), wrote in this fall’s edition of the school’s “The Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues” about the commission’s investigations showing...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Predatory lawyers should learn from sports bars

Go to any sports bar in the country, or any golf course, or just about any competitive venue at all, and the main rule is so simple that it rarely needs mentioning: Loser pays. The same rule applies in courtrooms, too, in developed nations throughout the world, but not in the United States. Here, uniquely, a winning defendant in a lawsuit is still responsible for paying his own attorney. So it was in the infamous $54 million lawsuit filed by D.C. administrative judge Roy Pearson over a lost pair of pants. The defendants, the Chung family, easily won the case at trial, but still were forced to pay $100,000 in legal fees (a number that will grow now that Pearson has filed an appeal). That...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: A High Court Docu-Drama

Just as Sen. John McCain does a slow fade from the public spotlight, so, too, does his signature law, the McCain-Feingold campaign restrictions, slowly but steadily lose both its power and its luster. The latest potential dimming of McCain-Feingold’s bright lines against “outside” campaign speech came Friday courtesy of the Supreme Court’s agreement to hear a case called Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. McCain-Feingold, of course, is famous for prohibiting corporate (“soft money”) campaign donations and for limiting the ability of outside groups to run campaign ads within 60 days of an election (or 30 days of a primary) without...

Continued...

 

Quin-Essential Cases: Business Failure is no Crime

Unbridled greed may be a sin, but not all sins are criminal. Likewise, not all attempts to make money are fairly characterized as greed. Nor is greed – as opposed to incompetence or even sheer bad luck – the cause of every financial failure. Similarly, it is not necessarily a sign of criminality for a failing businessman to want the benefit of counsel, and to want his conversations with his attorney to be confidential. Finally, the attempt to criminalize failed business practices retroactively, in a time of economic instability, could easily add to the instability and hamper any recovery. Such were the themes at a recent forum at the Heritage Foundation called...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: How 'Jackpot Justice' Cost America Jobs, Growth

Foreign businesses afraid of American “jackpot justice” are likely being deterred from investing within U.S. borders, and from hiring American workers to high-wage jobs, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Commerce. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez releasing the findings last week at the annual summit of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) in the nation’s capital. “Frivolous litigation prevents our businesses from hiring and growing, discourages foreign investment and, by tying up the courts, it delays access to justice to individuals who are truly injured,” Gutierrez told summit participants. Particularly important, he...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential cases: No Righting Voting Wrongs in Ohio

Topping the list of most important legal cases this election year may be one in which the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits, and about which the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) turned a blind eye to justice. Rampant voter fraud may well result. The nation’s highest court ruled Friday that, for now, a federal district court cannot force Ohio’s Secretary of State to enforce federal elections laws that she is flagrantly ignoring. Oddly enough, the Supreme Court is right: A loophole allows the Secretary of State to make a mockery of the law – unless and until DOJ steps in. But DOJ is so busy suppressing political speech that it can’t be bothered with...

Continued...

 

Lawsuit Could Rein In Medicare Bureaucrats

Did you know that American citizens on Social Security cannot refuse Medicare “benefits” even if they wish to save the government some money by paying for their own medical care? U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer has been assigned the chance to reverse this profoundly unfair rule, and thus strike a blow for free choice, common sense, and the Constitution. In what could turn into a landmark case, plaintiffs Brian Hall, Lewis Randall and Norman Rogers are senior citizens who wish to receive the Social Security benefits for which they have spent their adult lifetimes paying. Hall is from Catlett, VA, while Randall is from Freeland, WA, and Rogers lives in Miami,...

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Give last rites to voting wrongs

Something is wrong when a law passed 43 years ago to fight discrimination against black Americans is used now to harass local governments with no history of racial discrimination, upset the constitutional balance, and add tremendous expense to the elections process – especially when it arguably harms the interests of black voters more than it helps. A small Texas subdivision of 3,500 people is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case arguing that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is unconstitutional. By right, by justice, and by the Constitution itself, the subdivision ought to prevail. Section 5 requires any jurisdiction within nine states (mostly those of the old...

Continued...

 

Ecuadoran oil case is the pits

Google “The Godfather: Part II,” and “quotes” and you’ll find one of the thugs touting the great advantages of a “partnership with a friendly government.” In Ecuador, certain members of the American plaintiffs’ bar have found their partner. In a shakedown worthy of Mario Puzo’s epic, a host of American lawyers led by Philadelphia attorney Joseph Kohn have effectively “partnered” with the Ecuadoran government in an attempt to wrest up to $16 billion from the Chevron corporation – without proof of either harm or culpability, and in the face of a ten-year old contract by the Ecuadoran government itself that completely...

Continued...

 

Judges: McCain’s strong suit

John McCain’s campaign seems to enjoy momentum right now, but if it falters down the stretch, McCain can find strength on the bench. One of the only lines that received enthusiastic applause from delegates during the flat first half of John McCain’s Republican National Convention speech last Thursday came when the nominee said his party “believes in the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don’t legislate from the bench.” Earlier that same day Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., predicted to a group of bloggers that the Senate would confirm not a single new federal appeals court judge the rest of this year, after having...

Continued...

 

McCain basks in the roars of pumped-up crowd

As recently as 10 days ago, few political experts would have predicted that maverick Sen. John McCain would have been greeted with such joyous enthusiasm, even at a convention dedicated to promoting him. But when McCain spoke Thursday night, on a stage reconfigured so he could be surrounded by the audience as he is in his beloved town hall meetings, the crowd that had been energized the night before by running mate Sarah Palin exploded into a frenzy of cheers and a sea of blue McCain-Palin signs. Before McCain cold get into his prepared remarks, the crowd interrupted again with a full minute of a chant of “U-S-A, U-S-A!!” And when anti-war protesters, previously out of sight,...

Continued...

 

McCain and Palin offer a new brand of conservatism

Sarah Palin’s speech Wednesday night was an opening salvo in what will be an autumn-long argument for a new brand of conservatism, consisting more of right-leaning instincts than an articulated political philosophy. The conservatism of John McCain and Palin is an odd hybrid: part traditionalist and part anti-establishmentarian. Think of it as populism married to fiscal austerity. And it’s expressed with a reformist feistiness that is not ideological at all. To convince the public that this approach is coherent and efficacious, rather than a dog’s breakfast, will take real skill both by Palin and by McCain. Whatever its merits, their hybrid is more difficult to understand...

Continued...

 

Atmosphere electric at Mile High Stadium

‘Like a rock star, but with substance’ The anticipation building through the afternoon and evening in the crowd of an estimated 75,000 at Invesco Field boiled over when Democratic nominee Barack Obama walked through the pillars on the makeshift stage. By that time, night had fallen over the stadium, somehow adding an intimacy to what had seemed a cavernous pavilion in the Rocky Mountain twilight. Television platform lights and baselights from the podium created eerie shadows over the crowd. An expectant hush fell on the audience as a brief biographical film was shown that emphasized Obama's upbringing by a single mother. And then Obama finally took the stage, with soft...

Continued...

 

The Hillaryville Horror is coming

Could Hillary Clinton yet emerge as this year’s Democratic nominee for president? Some of us can’t get the nightmare out of our minds. The nightmare itself is a recurring one, except that it always takes slightly different forms and, worse, it happens in real life rather than in dreams. The back-from-the-dead proclivities of Bill and Hillary Clinton are too well-established to be ignored. And there is indeed a scenario — highly unlikely but, with the Clintons, not impossible — where it could manifest itself again in these next 10 days. To understand why Clintonophobes are spooked, consider all the times when the Clintons were assumed to be politically dead. Kaput....

Continued...

 

Who lost when Lerach won?

Discredited securities lawyer Bill Lerach recently wrote from his prison cell that nobody was "disadvantaged or harmed" by his actions. And his fees were "earned … won through hard work," he claimed. Others would beg to differ. One of Lerach's biggest paydays will come as he sits in the federal penitentiary when he collects his ample portion of the $688 million in attorneys' fees in $7.2 billion settlements with banks he sued in the Enron scandal. But Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who earlier had supported Lerach's legal claims in the Enron cases, has since challenged the $688 million, arguing that such generosity would be a "windfall" for...

Continued...

 

How the mighty Lerach has fallen: Power lawyer to prisoner

When he was on top of the world, flamboyant class-action plaintiffs lawyer William S. Lerach made more than $100 million during the 1990s for himself and even more for his now-disgraced firm, Milberg Weiss. Silicon Valley tech executives shuddered and Fortune 500 chief executive officers reached for their checkbooks at the mere mention of being "Lerached." At one point, Lerach boasted that he had won more than $4 billion in damages for shareholders in 400 class-action securities suits. Lerach once called himself "the Willie Horton of securities law." Bullying, foul-mouthed, he ran roughshod over corporations, fishing for real and imagined malfeasance against...

Continued...

 

Lerach in short form

» William Shannon Lerach was born in 1946 in Pittsburgh. His father, Richard Lerach, was a stockbroker who invested his entire fortune in the stock market, only to lose it in the 1929 crash, according to the son. » Completed undergraduate and law school at the University of Pittsburgh, finishing second in his class in the latter. Landed his first job with prestigious Pittsburgh firm, Reed Smith Shaw & McClay. » Made partner in Reed Smith in record time, but left in 1976, saying he thought he was on the wrong side in the courtroom. Said of the plaintiff in his last case there: "This guy's case was so good, and he was so right, and we just chopped him up into...

Continued...

 

The trial bar goes on the offensive

Judging by recent headlines, the trial-lawyer lobby in Washington should be deep in bunkers, fighting a defensive action. High-profile class-action plaintiffs’ lawyers such as Dickie Scruggs, Bill Lerach and Melvyn Weiss all have been convicted for various criminal offenses, and a federal judge unearthed major fraud among claimants in asbestosis lawsuits. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has found the bunkers empty and the trial bar more aggressive than ever. The chamber sees the trial bar as having been reinvigorated. According to the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, special provisions that would benefit plaintiffs’ attorneys are proliferating in Congress. Hence...

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Will Leahy ride to workers’ defense?

T he Heritage Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union are not accustomed to being allies. Neither are former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. But they and an equally wide-ranging assortment of conservative and liberal lawyers and organizations have joined forces to overturn a Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: A modest proposal for judicial nominees

Justice delayed is justice denied. Senate Democrats are denying one heck of a lot of justice for the people of North Carolina. Senate Republicans, on the other hand, are proposing a plan to ensure more timely justice no matter which party would benefit.As highlighted earlier this week by a most informative forum on judicial nominations sponsored by the Senate Republican Conference, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad of North Carolina on Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of his nomination to the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, without the courtesy of......

Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: A vote for President is a vote for judges

Three years ago today the nation was halfway into 18 days of feverish speculation about whom President George W. Bush would name to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the U.S. Supreme Court, with high drama and several major false rumors preceding the choice of now-Chief Justice John Roberts. Next......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Careerists at Justice protect their buddies on the left

J ournalists had a high old time blasting Bush appointees at the Department of Justice last week for allegedly politicizing the hiring system for career — i.e., non-politically selected — jobs. But the media missed the bigger picture.Career federal employees at DOJ are already heavily politicized, not to the right but to the left. Investigations have been skewed not in favor of Republicans, but for Democrats. And departmental policy choices — the very things elections are supposed to determine — have been repeatedly obstructed by intransigent careerists who refuse to......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: High Court blows away President Bush’s brief

W ith Supreme Court decisions as with firearms, sometimes the most important reverberations are felt only after the initial big bang has dissipated.The "big bang" in yesterday’s D.C. v. Heller handgun case, of course, was the correct decision that the right to bear arms belongs to individuals regardless of whether they are active members of a "militia."But an equally important point, though far more subtle, was the majority’s refusal to invite further, endless judicial hairsplitting about a fundamental constitutional right.Instead of giving the judiciary more chances to decide if a......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: When the feds should back off

Don’t make a federal case out of it!"That’s a common expression used to signify an overreaction. The expression is apt because Congress continually creates new "crimes" that really ought to be handled at the state or local level, if at all. All too often, the federal response is an overreaction — unnecessary, redundant, abusive and/or actually counterproductive.Scholars, judges and law enforcement officials across the political spectrum have recognized that problem for at least a decade, and even the U.S. Supreme......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Crustacean frustration

When the story first broke in 1999, the Mobile Register played it tongue-in-cheek. "The defendants," wrote reporter Mike Wilson, "have proved model prisoners, detained at present at minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit."The originally named defendants were 70,787 pounds of spiny lobster tails. Less than 5 percent of them were, horror of horrors, too short – which may or may not have been a violation of Honduran sea-harvest laws.Even worse, the dastardly tails entered Continued...

 

When lawsuit-abuse purgatory is an improvement

Alabama was the original "tort hell." It was so named in a 1996 Forbes Magazine piece often credited with coining the term. Alabama was the home of the infamous BMW v. Gore case in whicha court awarded $2 million in punitive damages for a botched $600 paint job on a car.As recently as 1999, Alabamans were embarrassed by a $581 million punitive-damages award over a $1,200 dispute about a home satellite dish.Today,......

Continued...

 

Here come da judges

Sometimes a state can curb lawsuit abuse not by changing its laws, but by changing who interprets them. That’s the message of a March 2008 paper by business professors Martin Grace and J. Tyler Leverty. They note that 27 percent of state lawsuit-abuse reforms between 1985 to 2006 were declared unconstitutional by state supreme courts. They report that only when businesses are confident that reforms will stick will insurance premiums start......

Continued...

 

Tort reform is good medicine

Good things happen when states implement class-action lawsuit reforms.That is the inescapable conclusion from both ample anecdotal evidence and hard empirical data resulting from efforts by numerous states in recent years to rein in class-action lawsuit abuse.Good things happen when states reform their legal systems to end abuses that lead to "jackpot justice," including expanding the availability of health care, cutting health care costs, improving health in at-risk communities and increasing job creation, among other benefits. The list of success stories in states enacting lawsuit-abuse reforms is growing, especially when......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: District pays the price for ‘humanitarian’ court

If one wonderswhy the District of Columbia government sometimes has fiscal problems, look no further. Even when D.C. officials try to do the right thing, the D.C. Court of Appeals won’t let them.In McCamey v. D.C. Department of Employment Services, the D.C. Court of Appeals refused May 15 to let the city’s director of employment services maintain existing safeguards against spurious workers’ compensation claims.To overrule both the director and......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Regulatory police state grows

One reason federal regulatory agents are sometimes called "jack-booted thugs" is that they can behave thuggishly. Equally abusively, federal prosecutors on twisted power trips too often support such thuggishness.The results can be devastating for individual lives, including those of entirely innocent people. Regulatory thuggery doesn’t help the economy, either. In far more restrained language, that’s the basic message from a report released this month by the Washington Legal Foundation, a nonpartisan legal advocate for free enterprise.Titled "Special Report: Federal Erosion......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: This Herring case must be read

Few sorts of Supreme Court cases affect ordinary Americans as much as cases about crime and punishment. Rulings about how police enforce the law can create vast repercussions for public safety.In that light, an Alabama case that the U.S. Supreme Court will consider next fall takes on particular importance. The case is a doozy. A constitutional violation seems to have occurred, but the remedy isn’t clear. And a ruling against the police......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Court offers towering nonsense on terrorism

Something is badly wrong with our culture as well as our courts if terrorists can be found less culpable for their acts of terrorism than the owners of the buildings that were terrorized.The buildings, in this case, are quite familiar — famous for no longer existing. They were known as the World Trade Center. Eight years before 9/11, terrorists exploded a truck bomb in the WTC garage, killing six and injuring hundreds.On Wednesday, a Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Republicans misjudge their own advantages

As Senate Democrats and Republicans continue their sparring match over judicial nominees, the Democrats seem to understand the politics of the battle far better than the Republicans.Democrats understand that they win when they keep Republicans merely frustrated but not outraged, but, when the judiciary becomes a major public issue, Republicans almost always beat the Democrats to a pulp.Yet, every time Republicans threaten action bold enough to move the nomination fight from a circus sideshow to the political main tent, Democrats buy them off with cotton candy promises.They did it again......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Court should stop California’s patent theft

A state has no right to steal, use and profit from the lawfully acknowledged intellectual property of a private citizen or group. To claim otherwise in a free society is unthinkable, monstrous and a clear step toward accepting the economic underpinnings of fascism.Today the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether to review a case that involves an attempt by California to assert just such a monstrous privilege. The court should grant the......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Senate Dems ignore Puryear despite Thurgood Marshall praise

Gus Puryear IV ought to be a shoo-in for a federal district judgeship in Tennessee, but instead he is under attack.By all accounts a talented lawyer with accomplishments beyond his 39 years, Puryear is strongly backed by his home-state senators, both moderate Republicans. One of his avid supporters, David Randolph Smith, is the lawyer who headed the opposing legal team......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Faith of some is more equal than faith of others

If Barack Obama had written the key essay in the most recently published issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, liberal Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee would be praising it.But the essay, about the ways in which the concurrent demands of faith and the law affect public officials, was instead written by one of the recent judicial appointees whom those same committee......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Alabama case could nullify state courts

Beware of court cases that begin when black politicians decide that a black appointee isn’t the right kind to represent a majority-black district.Naturally, the black appointee thought to be the wrong sort is a Republican and the black politicians opposing him are Democrats. The Democrats enlisted federal bureaucrats to carry their case to a friendly federal district court, which bizarrely ruled in their favor. Earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Alabama’s appeal of that bizarre decision.What happened was this: Since 1868, Alabama state law has......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Judge knot still holds

Peter Keisler is one of the most accomplished constitutional lawyers in the United States.A former Yale Law Journal editor, law clerk on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for D.C. and at the Supreme Court, and the acting attorney general of the United States in 2007, Keisler......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Investors will be safe with Cox at the helm

For investors worried about corporate mismanagement, the Securities and Exchange Commission is offering the proverbial ounce of prevention that is far better than the ton of cure that class-action lawsuits purport to provide.In truth, investors and corporate officers alike will benefit from the SEC’s initiatives -- and from a recent string of setbacks for the investor-plaintiffs’ bar. Those setbacks have included convictions of prominent lawyers, investigations of others, and a string of decisions both in trial courts......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: FISA lawsuits come from Twilight Zone

Telecommunications companies in the crossfire betweencongressional Democrats and the White House face lawsuits so breathtaking that it’s a wonder they continue to help anti-terrorism efforts at all when other industries already have balked.But it’s not just the telecoms at risk: If the plaintiffs receive everything they request, the telecoms could not even survive, and the nation’s entire, everyday communications network could fracture.To review: The Protect America Act, the controversial part of which provides for electronic surveillance of suspected foreign......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: CPAC conservatives, McCain in lukewarm alliance (maybe)

John McCain still has a big political problem. Even after giving a nearly pitch-perfect speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee could generate only mild enthusiasm among the most active foot soldiers of the conservative movement.Sure, most conservatives know that they will need to vote for the Arizona Republican senator to keep Continued...

 

Quin-essential Cases: Immunity Request Is No Phone-y Plea

We've seen it in James Bond movies or super-cop flicks hundreds of times: The spy or the policeman jumps into a vehicle, flashes some fancy identification badge, and orders the driver (or helmsman or conductor) to break all known speed limits or other regulations while chasing some bad guy or intercept delivery of a bomb. Audience members never question whether the driver has any real choice in the matter. Nor should they. Simple duty demands that the driver comply. And......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Lawyers courting defeat

Class-action plaintiffs’ lawyers, the bullies of the American court system, are finally getting the sand kicked in their own faces. If there’s any justice, they ought to become accustomed to the taste.For years, big-money, class-action plaintiffs’ lawyers have terrorized businesses and doctors while collectively pocketing literally billions of dollars, often on behalf of "victims," who individually benefit from their work by amounts that wouldn’t cover a single dinner at a nice restaurant.Suddenly, though, the plaintiffs’ bar is in well-merited retreat. Indictments, convictions, big losses before the Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Nation safer with originalist judges

Supreme Court controversies are all the rage right now — as well they should be.If any more evidence were needed that the American people are fascinated with the court, a look at the newest New York Times nonfiction best-seller list proves the point: Justice Clarence Thomas’ memoir, "My Grandfather’s Son," debuts at the very top spot, and Jeffrey Toobin’s "The Nine" is in fourth position. And "Supreme Conflict" by ABC-TV’s Jan Crawford Greenburg deservedly continues to garner rave reviews as well.But for a purely intellectual yet highly readable delineation of......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: No secret handshakes on right for Mukasey

Bet you didn’t know that the law was all about secret handshakes and treehouses.Little new evidence is needed to prove that the political left and right use entirely different language and frames of reference in their understanding of court- and law-related issues, but ... the nomination of former federal District Judge Michael Mukasey has brought those differences into utterly stark relief.In particular, many on the left seem constitutionally unable (forgive the pun) to allow for the slightest possibility that conservative legal scholars and practitioners can consider the issues with anyintellectual......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Case offers cold comfort for ‘Cold Cash’ Jefferson

U.S. Rep. William "Cold Cash" Jefferson may benefit from judges who look through the wrong end of their constitutional binoculars.Two federal appeals court judges who ruled partly in Jefferson’s favor earlier this month seem to have inverted the original intention of the Constitution’s legislative "Speech and Debate" protection. They are making it a shield for secrecy instead of a protection for candor.At issue is the FBI’s 2006 raid on Jefferson’s congressional office while investigating allegations that led to Jefferson’s indictment on bribery charges. Backed by many congressional leaders, Jefferson argued......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: The last word on sentences

When does a trial judge go too far in meting out a tough sentence based on factors other than those a jury considered in rendering its verdict?A trial by jury is, of course, sacrosanct. Supreme Court precedents are clear that judges err when they rely too much on their own wisdom rather than that of a jury’s.So at first glance, a case decided last week by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals seems to be an example of a trial judge being properly reined in. But closer examination raises......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: High court’s partial-birth decision was no landmark

America’s socio-political left is up in arms about the Supreme Court’s April 18 decision to uphold a ban on partial-birth abortions. Conservatives are pleased with the case but consider it somewhat small potatoes.How can one side claim to have suffered a big defeat while the other claims only a small victory? The answer lies in the differences between how the left and the right approach the entire concept of constitutional law.First, some background: The April decision, Gonzales v. Carhart, was the first time since 1973’s Roe v. Wade case that......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: No photo, no vote? Doh!

Nobody argues against the government’s right to require that airplane passengers show a photographic identification; yet when government tries to impose the same reasonable requirement on voters, liberal lawyers and activists scream bloody murder.So it is that when the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in January (and effectively affirmed the decision by denial of a rehearing in April) that Indiana was within its rights to require photo IDs at the polls, the state Democratic Party and would-be voters represented by the ACLU decided (just last week) to......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: California schools case shows courts’ race to confusion

Can a government choose our children’s schools based on "considerations" of race without engaging in racial "discriminations"? That’s a question with which the U.S. Supreme Court, by virtue of its own hair-splitting, has been tangling for years.A case decided earlier this month in California’s Alameda County — sure to be appealed to higher state or federal courts — shows why judicial hair-splitting on racial issues is so counterproductive. For every strand of apparent reason that emerges, another strand of faulty logic invites newly inventive efforts at race-based micromanagement. That leads,......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Federal court says prayer is OK, but ‘mere worship’ not protected by the First Amendment

There they go again! The hard-left majority of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals tried again earlier this month to create out of thin air a constitutional principle of hostility to religion. It ought not succeed.In the case of Faith Center Church Evangelistic Ministries v. Glover, the majority overturned a perfectly reasonable preliminary injunction issued by a district court. The injunction ordered the Antioch Library in Contra Costa to allow Faith Center the same opportunity to use library meeting rooms that Democratic Party groups and other community organizations enjoy, at......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: An oily mess as Alabama siphons Exxon’s tank

When a simple contract dispute is treated as fraud, when a state’s elected jurists are deciding a case in which the state has a financial interest, when punitive damage payments are awarded to the state despite state law saying the state cannot receive such awards, when part of the award is calculated based on expected fraud that had not yet occurred, and when both recent state case law and Supreme Court precedent argue strongly against an exorbitant award, then it’s a fair bet that the award won’t stand without being......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Katrina case could force insurers to pay unprovable claims

Big insurance companies have often been portrayed, sometimes deservedly, as being among the villains of the post-Katrina nightmare on the Gulf Coast. But in a Mississippi case decided last week (certain to be appealed), the insurance companies and all their non-Katrina clients look far more like victims.The case of Broussard v. State Farm, like probably thousands of similar cases, involves a dispute about whether wind, or only water, was responsible for the damage to a home. According to standard homeowners’ policies, wind damage is covered, but not flood damage. Stories......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: The right not to contribute

The U.S. Supreme Court next month has a chance to teach some important lessons to a major teachers’ union — and to the Washington state high court that acted as the teachers’ union pet.In the case of Davenport v. Washington Education Association (henceforth the WEA), the Washington State Supreme Court upended at least three separate legal principles. If the state court’s ruling stands, the union will be allowed, against the express intent of the state Legislature, to use the compulsory dues of non-members for political purposes without the workers’ direct......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Ohio case not a minor abortion decision

While much of the nation’s legal attention is focused on the Supreme Court’s pending partial-birth abortion case, lower courts continue to use any excuse at hand, no matter how far-fetched, to strike down even the mildest restrictions on abortion.These courts act as if sophistry in support of abortion is no vice.The latest example occurred earlier this month, when a panel of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Cincinnati Women’s Services v. Taft that the state of Ohio had no right to limit the number of petitions a......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: A real waste of a lawsuit

Politicians frequently engage in long, pitched battles over merely incremental changes in law. Now, however, the governor of Arkansas and the attorney general of Oklahoma are fighting over an issue that some might say is purely excremental.The latest skirmish in the battle came just last week, when Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee accused Oklahoma AG Drew Edmondson of "playing politics" in demanding reductions in poultry-farm runoff that, Huckabee says, have "no scientific basis of possibility." Edmondson has been prosecuting his animus against animal wastes by filing a lawsuit (State of Oklahoma......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Texas suit challenges wrongful voting rites

Guilty until proven innocent.Concerning the sin of racial discrimination, that’s how Congress continues to treat Southern states and localities — but a small Texas utility district has filed the first of what may be many similar lawsuits that challenge Congress’ power to do just that.By all reasonable standards of both law and justice, the Texas plaintiffs ought to win their suit. But this suit, perhaps combined with others along the same lines, is unlikely to succeed (or fail) without first becoming one of those landmark cases that sends the political......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Is Christianity still legal in America?

A case from Illinois now winding its way through the federal courts tests the dubious proposition that Christianity and equal opportunity are in conflict. Christianity is winning for now, but federal courts have done weird things, so the case bears watching.The controversy arose at the Southern Illinois University School of Law when in 2004 a campus chapter of the Christian Legal Society was one of 17 student organizations afforded official recognition by the school.Recognition meant access to the college’s bulletin board and electronic Listserve and the ability to reserve university......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: Suit against KFC is fowl play

Kentucky Fried Chicken wants to kill all its customers in Washington, D.C.That’s the basic thrust of the wacky legal argument offered by the misnamed Center for Science in the Public Interest to justify a lawsuit it filed against KFC last month. The stated aim of the suit is to force the fast-food giant to stop using partially hydrogenated oil to cook its food. CSPI says the oil is full of trans fats, which it says "kills roughly 50,000 Americans per year."CSPI does not merely accuse KFC of negligence, however. Instead......

Continued...

 

Quin Hillyer: The Army Corps of Engineers is all wet

Justice can’t flow down like water if justices treat mere wetlands as if theyare mighty streams.In a decision due this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on two conjoined cases about the limits of Congress’ power to "regulate commerce … among the several states." The repercussions of the decision will be profound. At stake is the preservation of state regulatory authority (as opposed to federal authority) and, more importantly, the protection of individual property rights.The power to regulate commerce also carries with it the power to regulate the avenues of......

Continued...