Court Challenge
by Kimberley A. Strassel - September 25th, 2006 - Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal)
New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer garnered a stunning 81% of the vote in his primary for the New York governorship two weeks ago, riding high on his reputation as Chief Persecutor of Wall Street. It was the sort of result that should have made grown CEOs cry.
Still, there was some reason for good cheer in the business community: namely, a race on the other side of the country. In Washington, a relatively unknown property-rights lawyer, John Groen, challenged the activist chief justice of the state Supreme Court. It was the most hotly contested judicial contest in state history--highest profile, highest dollar, highest stakes. Mr. Groen lost last week, but barely. Across the country, incumbent judges--who are rarely challenged, much less seriously so--began shaking in their robes.
This article shows that some in the business community are getting fed up with the court's war against the rule of law. Our system of extortion, blackmail, liberal suppression of laws liberals don't like, and revolving door criminal justice to maximize attorney fees, has at long last riled up the business community.
The question I have to ask is, "Will they fight the ethical battle and return us to the rule of law or will they simply redirect the trial lawyers to pick on others outside business?"
That is the problem with the courts. They always pick their battles carefully. They give each group some reason to hope they are ethical while always maximizing court and judicial power.
This is a good article and describes a new front in the war to get back to the rule of law. It will be interesting.
Feminists Responsible . . .
. . . for boom in unnecessary temporary restraining orders
by Phyllis Schlafly - September 12th, 2006 - Townhall.com
It brought to mind the title of the George Gershwin song "They All Laughed" when a Santa Fe, N.M., family court judge granted a temporary restraining order against "Late Show" host David Letterman to protect a woman he had never met, never heard of, and lived 2,000 miles away from.
Colleen Nestler claimed that Letterman had caused her "mental cruelty" and "sleep deprivation" for over a decade by using code words and gestures during his network television broadcasts.
Our courts are a joke. The "rule of judges" seems to have created a situation where more and more of our judges are simply unable to apply any common sense to their rulings. They act like we are so stupid we cannot see how ignorant is the claim that they are "just following the law". They are not following the law. They are abusing the law and ruling like buffoons.
You know what? They are buffoons!
Accusations Of 'Double Dipping'
by Mike Tolson - September 10th, 2006 - Houston Chronicle
Accusations of 'double dipping' — trying to use the same client for 2 different claims — surface
When Roger Redditt died of lung cancer in 2002, there seemed no great mystery as to why. Though only 50, he had smoked all of his adult life — two packs a day for most of it, cutting down to a single pack over the final five years.
Then lawyers got involved, and four years later Redditt's cause of death remains a point of contention. The longtime welder and one-time sandblaster has become a potentially significant figure in the national scandal involving silicosis lawsuits.
Attorneys for his widow, two sets of them, filed lawsuits blaming others for Redditt's cancer. One claimed exposure to asbestos led to his death, and Debra Redditt has already collected settlements from some of those defendants. The other set of attorneys point to a long-ago employer as the real cause of his death by exposing him to crystalline silica, an industrial sand used in sandblasting and other applications.
Attorneys for a handful of silica defendants say the cigarettes surely killed him — and insist his case is a classic example of abuse of the tort system.
This is a great article on the corruption of America's system of extortion and blackmail, referred to by its supporters as a "justice system". That referrence is of course mostly a joke, as justice has not been the goal for over 100 years. The American court system is a system that allows attorneys to extort money, and makes judges powerful rulers, all the while making sure that justice is never the goal.
"There is a pattern of some lawyers in not being straight with courts, and in this case not being straight with Congress," said Lisa Rickard, president of U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform and a longtime critic of mass torts. "It's incredibly brazen behavior, which is not atypical for the plaintiff bar."
The proof that there is no concern with justice though is that neither the lawyers nor the judges that have allowed billions to be extorted from the American populace ever go to jail, even when proven they have lied. They are simply not allowed to win some of their cases and they go on with their extortion scheme in other cases as if nothing happened.
Welcome to the "rule of judges".
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Last Chance For A Color-blind Constitution?
by William Perry Pendley - September 1st, 2006 - Townhall.com
In the Court’s 2003 ruling on the use of race by law schools to achieve “diversity,” Justice O’Connor opined that such programs should last no longer than 25 years. Given the Court’s troubling history on the issue and the relentlessness of advocates of state-sponsored racial preferences and quotas (wrongly called “affirmative action”), proponents of a color-blind Constitution took no comfort in her meaningless pledge. Their worst fears were realized when, using Justice O’Connor’s 2003 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld the constitutionality of a plan by Seattle School District #1 to assign students based on their race to achieve “diversity.”
This article shows the roller coaster pattern of our justices in caring about our Constitutional guarantee of equal justice under the law and then abandoning this concern when they think it is popular to do so. Their latest belief that the Constitutional guarantee of equal rights may be subverted to some bureaucrat’s view of what constitutes diversity is the latest contempt they show for their sworn duty.
Justice O'Conner essentially ruled in 2003 that the Supreme Court could suspend the Constitution for 25 years if there was something the Supreme Court saw as an important goal, no matter how many people's rights were damaged in the attempt. O'Connor seems too stupid to realize that if the court can suspend the Constitution for 25 years, they can do it forever with equal arrogance.
