judic bak

judiciary918<div>
</div><div><div>judiciary918</div><div>
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</div><div>COURTS 2 1/17</div><div>
</div><div>capt 918</div><div>
</div><div>see also judicial tag (orphan 315) legal tag</div><div>
</div><div>important source of moderation, eg&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/fracking/two-small-towns-win-huge-legal-case-fracking-will-many-others-follow</div><div>
</div><div>NY court</div><div>
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</div><div>see Jud Conf Network, RAGA tort reform, defund the left</div><div>
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</div><div>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/how-conservatives-won-the-battle-over-the-courts/564533/</div><div>
</div><div>zelzier</div><div>
</div><div>As Democrats await to hear whom President Donald Trump will pick on Monday to fill the vacancy left by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, many have a feeling of pure dread.</div><div>
</div><div>While activists are mobilizing in the states of so-called moderate Republicans like Senator Susan Collins of Maine, hoping to sway their vote against a potentially ultraconservative replacement, there is a widespread feeling in liberal circles that the effort will fail. Even if Democrats can figure out some kind of Hail Mary move to prevent the most extreme pick from being seated, Trump will certainly be able to solidify a conservative majority on the high Court one way or another. The only real question is just how far right the court will move. The ghosts of the liberal Supreme Court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren will officially be vanquished. On a number of crucial issues—abortion rights, voting rights, gay rights, partisan gerrymandering, civil liberties—a conservative majority will have immense influence on American policy for decades to come.</div><div>
</div><div>How did conservatives finally win the battle to shape the character of the Supreme Court to have a rock-solid ideological majority that has not been seen since the days of Warren? The answers go far beyond the luck that Trump has experienced with vacancies.</div><div>
</div><div>As described by the political scientist Steven M. Teles in his book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement, the strategy began in the 1980s, when conservatives realized that they would have to play the long game. Focusing on each individual judicial nomination from Democratic administrations was a fool’s errand—even after Republicans finally gained control of the Senate in the 1980 election. Conservatives invested heavily in organizations that would nurture and support lawyers and justices who stuck to an “originalist” interpretation of the Constitution, which means that their understanding is theoretically derived from the original meaning of the Constitution at the time it was written.</div><div>
</div><div>MORE BY JULIAN E. ZELIZER</div><div>
</div><div>American Democracy Can’t Fix Itself</div><div>JULIAN E. ZELIZER</div><div>
</div><div>The New Enemies List</div><div>JULIAN E. ZELIZER</div><div>
</div><div>The Press Doesn’t Cause Wars—Presidents Do</div><div>JULIAN E. ZELIZER</div><div>
</div><div>Can the Cohen Tapes Bring Down Trump?</div><div>JULIAN E. ZELIZER</div><div>A consortium of students and professors based at Yale Law School founded the Federalist Society in 1982, which would prove to be the most influential originalist organization. The society helped recruit the brightest legal minds and supported them as their careers unfolded. The Federalist Society was careful to find people who could be counted on as solid conservative picks for the courts. It offered a social-professional network to connect young law students with influential senior mentors, such as the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Attorney General Edwin Meese provided support from within Ronald Reagan’s administration, encouraging the group’s efforts. Meese headed much of the administration’s selection of 400 federal judges, introducing a type of ideological profiling of potential nominees that made conservative criteria a determining factor. Meese’s insistence on the “jurisprudence of original intention” influenced many important figures, including Chief Justice John Roberts.</div><div>
</div><div>As Lawrence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor, told The New York Times in 2005, “Meese was successful in making it look like he and his disciples were carrying out the intentions of the great founders, where the liberals were making it up as they went along.” The marriage of Federalist Society ideas and Republican Party politics would continue. Lee Liberman Otis, a co-founder of the Federalist Society, gained a key role in George H. W. Bush’s White House Counsel’s Office and influenced judicial picks.The Federalist Society was not alone. Other organizations, such as the Institute for Justice and the Center for Individual Rights, joined this effort. Rightward philanthropists and organizations (Joseph Coors, Charles and David Koch, the Olin Foundation) poured money into certain law schools, such as George Mason University, whose faculty members were supportive of conservative ideas in their research and would train their students accordingly.</div><div>
</div><div>But President George W. Bush was the first Republican president to really elevate the Federalist Society to being the prime source of advice in his judicial selections. Although Leonard Leo, the Federalist Society’s executive director, who was deeply influenced by Meese, supported Bush’s 2005 nomination of his personal attorney Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, most members of the society attacked the selection and successfully pushed for the nomination to be withdrawn. Her successor was Judge Samuel Alito, a favorite of the Federalist Society. “The Federalist Society was, when it got started, a wonderful idea,” Steven Calabresi, a law professor who worked for Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, recounted to The New York Times in 2005. The organization achieved its goal in making “a lot of conservative thought seem as respectable and attractive as it is.” Trump’s famous list of potential candidates from the 2016 campaign, which he is also using to make his choice for Kennedy’s replacement, was formed in consultation with the Federalist Society.</div><div>
</div><div>Conservatives did not rely on networking alone. The right realized that outside the presidential power to appoint, the Senate’s control over the confirmation process is essential. They learned this lesson the hard way in 1987, when Reagan’s pick for the Court, Robert Bork, a Yale Law School professor who had worked with the Federalist Society, was defeated, as Senate Democrats, who held the majority, portrayed him as an extremist.</div><div>
</div><div>Because 60 votes were needed at the time to confirm an appointee, Bork had no chance, and Reagan was forced to go with his second choice, Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew after admitting to smoking marijuana, and then finally with Anthony Kennedy. Republicans never forgot this lesson, and ever since, they have been willing to ruthlessly use their legislative power to influence the confirmation process.</div><div>
</div><div>During President Barack Obama’s tenure, Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and his caucus delayed and obstructed a historically unprecedented number of judicial appointments. The obstruction became so great that Democratic Senator Harry Reid took the historic step in 2013, when his party controlled the chamber, of jettisoning the filibuster against non–Supreme Court appointments as well as Cabinet officials. But Republicans regained control of the Senate in the 2014 midterm elections, allowing them to block Obama’s judicial picks entirely. According to Sarah Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, “GOP foot dragging on Obama nominees for both appellate and district court vacancies has far outstripped Democrats’ slowdown of Bush nominees between 2003 and 2008 (under both unified and divided party control).” Neither record, she added, was as great as the Republican delays on nominations by Bill Clinton’s administration.</div><div>
</div><div>In the 114th Congress, Senate Republicans confirmed the lowest number of judicial nominations since the final year of Harry Truman’s presidency, filling only 22 of Obama’s nominations from January 2015 through December 2016. “There was an almost total breakdown of confirmations once the Republicans took control of the Senate,” argues Russell Wheeler, a Brookings Institution expert on the U.S. judicial system. After Scalia’s death in 2016, McConnell revealed how far Republicans would go to influence the Court when his party refused to even meet with Merrick Garland, Obama’s selection to fill Scalia’s seat. The pick received no hearings, no vote, nothing. McConnell’s office announced that the majority leader would not even hold a “perfunctory meeting” with Garland, but wished him well. “It is a president’s constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate’s constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent,” McConnell boldly stated in face of criticism.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans would simply wait until a Republican president was in office. Then in 2017, when Democrats filibustered President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch, Reid’s party paid the price for his decision. Despite the Republicans’ age-old talk about the importance of protecting minority rights in the Senate, McConnell eliminated the filibuster on Supreme Court nominations to push Gorsuch’s nomination through. “This will be the first, and last, partisan filibuster of a Supreme Court justice,” the Kentucky conservative said on the floor. The Republican Senate has also approved the president’s appellate nominees at a faster rate than all other recent presidents. Under Trump, there has been much more consent from the Republican Senate than advise.</div><div>
</div><div>Republicans realized that conservative organizations and hardball legislative politics were not enough on their own. Certain landmark decisions would be extremely difficult to overturn given stare decisis, the doctrine that means, generally, that prior decisions by the Court should be adhered to. Regarding abortion, for example, Republican legislators have been much more focused on slowly gutting the ability to get an abortion than on attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade altogether. Republican Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois was one of the architects of this strategy. In 1976, he successfully added an amendment to legislation that prohibited the use of Medicaid funds to pay for an abortion, except when the life of the mother was in danger or in cases of incest and rape. This strategy has been replicated numerous times as Congress has expanded the reach of the Hyde amendment beyond Medicaid, while Republican legislatures have enacted similar restrictions on government funding for abortion on the state level.</div><div>
</div><div>The strategic move by conservatives away from overturning Roe v. Wade and toward death by a thousand cuts has allowed conservative justices to uphold legislation that undercuts the right to get an abortion without restrictions. Most recently, Justice Gorsuch was one member of the five-person majority that voted to uphold a California law stipulating that pregnancy crisis centers that do not provide abortions don’t have to tell patients they can obtain the procedure elsewhere and that the centers don’t have to disclose whether they have a medical license. When Republicans like Senator Collins or Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina promise that they won’t vote for a nominee who would overturn Roe, their statement is somewhat meaningless, because the real action has been on legislation that gradually erodes the meaning of the right to get an abortion rather than on simply overturning the decision itself.</div><div>
</div><div>To reach the point where conservatives are today, they also had to swallow some of their principles. One of the most important and influential decisions that conservative organizations and Republican politicians have made along the way to Monday’s pick has been supporting a president who will follow through on their judicial agenda. Evangelical organizations, which have historically been politically pragmatic when deciding which politicians to support, and their Republican allies took the most strikingly hypocritical stand by working for the candidacy and presidency of a person whose personal behavior contradicts so much of what they claim to stand for. As candidate, Trump made a very clear promise that he would appoint nominees they supported, and he followed through on his promise with Gorsuch.</div><div>
</div><div>Evangelical activists are not the only conservatives to live by this whatever-it-takes principle. Republican Senators have been doing the same since 2016. The #NeverTrump movement within the GOP has turned out to be one of the greatest fantasies of American politics. Congressional Republicans have been willing to stand by and support Trump, aside from few verbal reprimands, as long as he does what they want. Appointing conservative justices has been a central goal for the GOP. Trump is delivering, so they, too, are willing to withstand controversy and instability.</div><div>
</div><div>Reshaping the Supreme Court, one of the most consequential accomplishments that a president and his or her party can achieve, is a massive political undertaking. Conservatives have demonstrated that winning this kind of institutional battle takes years, even decades, and requires a ruthless disposition.</div><div>
</div><div>Frustrated with their inability to maintain solid control over Congress, and convinced that liberals influence most key institutions, including universities, conservatives set out to do what was necessary to build a court system that would protect the constitutional values of the right. Assuming that President Trump follows through on his promises to them on Monday, and that Democrats can’t block the nomination, they are about to enjoy the fruits of their efforts.</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>nb blue team truce?</div><div>
</div><div>https://www.ecowatch.com/nyc-divestment-2524285373.html</div><div>
</div><div>'Tide Is Turning': Cheers Erupt for NYC's Suit Against Fossil Fuel Giants and for Divestment</div><div>By Andrea Germanos</div><div>
</div><div>Climate advocates hailed what they say is a "watershed" moment on Wednesday following two announcements by New York City: that the city would seek to divest its pension funds from fossil fuels within five years, and that it filed suit against give five fossil fuel giants for their role in driving the climate crisis.</div><div>
</div><div>"This is a first-in-the-nation step to protect our future and our planet—for this generation and the next," said Comptroller Scott M. Stringer.</div><div>
</div><div>Stringer announced last month that he would soon bring a proposal to the trustees of the pension funds that included divestment. Following through on that promise, a statement from the city released Wednesday says that he and Mayor Bill de Blasio "will submit a joint resolution to pension fund trustees" to begin the steps needed to purge the funds from the dirty industry, which will first entail an analysis on the financial impacts to be carried out by the City Comptroller's Bureau of Asset Management.</div><div>
</div><div>350.org co-founder Bill McKibben said in a tweet responding to the news that it was "One of the biggest days in 30 years of the climate fight."</div><div>
</div><div>The city's five pension funds hold $189 billion in assets, and roughly $5 billion of that amount are held in the securities of over 190 fossil fuel companies, the city said.</div><div>
</div><div>The new lawsuit names BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell and seeks billions of dollars in damages for harm already inflicted on the city as a result of the climate crisis as well for preparing for effects yet to come, including "imminent threats to its property, its infrastructure, and the health and safety of its residents."</div><div>
</div><div>New York's lawsuit follows similar suits filed by seven cities and counties in California.</div><div>
</div><div>The city's statement references the industry's deliberate misinformation campaign to cover up the effects of fossil fuels.</div><div>
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</div><div>ICN portal</div><div>
</div><div>https://insideclimatenews.org/content/choke-hold</div><div>
</div><div>This yearlong investigation explores the ways the fossil fuel industry has fought to protect its central role in providing America's energy. Each Choke Hold article examines one particular front in the industry's battle to block stronger environmental regulation and action on climate change—its litigation fights, campaign contributions, public relations, control over science and more. Together these articles tell the story of the fossil fuel industry's inordinate influence across society.</div><div>
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</div><div>big win gop:&nbsp; pence tie break</div><div>
</div><div>Senate voted Tuesday night to kill a controversial rule that would have allowed Americans to file class-action suits against banks instead of being forced in many cases into private arbitration.</div><div>
</div><div>The move by the Senate followed a similar action by the House in July to rescind the rule. President Trump is expected to sign the repeal legislation, providing a major victory for the financial industry.</div><div>
</div><div>Vice President Mike Pence cast the deciding vote after the Senate tied 50-50. All but two Republicans — John Kennedy of Louisiana and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — voted to repeal the rule. No Democrats or independents supported the move.</div><div>
</div><div>The White House said Trump “applauds” Congress for voting to repeal the rule, which would have given consumers “fewer options for quickly and efficiently resolving financial disputes.”</div><div>
</div><div>The rule was unveiled in July by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and praised by Democrats and consumer advocates as giving average people more power to fight industry abuses, such as Wells Fargo & Co.’s creation of millions of unauthorized accounts.</div><div>
</div><div>But banking lobbyists argued that the rule would unleash a flood of class-action lawsuits, and that the cost of fighting those suits would be passed on to consumers. Republicans quickly moved to repeal the regulation.</div><div>
</div><div>“The entire purpose of this rule is to promote class-action litigation and stop arbitration resolution when there is a dispute,” said Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho).</div><div>
</div><div>The U.S. Chamber of Commerce praised the repeal vote, saying the rule “would have benefited the class-action trial bar at the expense of American consumers and businesses alike.”</div><div>
</div><div>Set to take effect in March, the rule would not have banned clauses in checking account, credit card and other banking agreements that say disputes between companies and customers must be dealt with privately or in small claims court.</div><div>
</div><div>Instead, there would have been a ban on provisions that block consumers from banding together to bring class-action cases. The CFPB argued that such cases help hold banks accountable.</div><div>
</div><div>The determinations of an arbitrator are binding and consumer advocates say most decisions favor the company. The private proceedings also allow banks to deal with individual problems quietly rather than address widespread abuses.</div><div>
</div><div>Bureau Director Richard Cordray called the Senate vote “a giant setback for every consumer in this country” and urged Trump to veto the repeal legislation.</div><div>
</div><div>“It robs consumers of their most effective legal tool against corporate wrongdoing,” Cordray said. “As a result, companies like Wells Fargo and Equifax remain free to break the law without fear of legal blowback from their customers.”</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/environment/how-public-trust-principle-can-defend-human-rights-against-fracking</div><div>
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</div><div>...ENVIRONMENT</div><div>
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</div><div>How the Public Trust Principle Can Defend Human Rights Against Fracking</div><div>
</div><div>Pure drinking water and breathable air are not privileges bestowed upon citizens by the government, but the rightful property of the people.</div><div>
</div><div>By Mary Christina Wood, Rance Shaw / Center for Humans and NatureJune 1, 2017, 12:00 PM GMT</div><div>
</div><div>In her essay, “The View From 31,000 Feet: A Philosopher Looks at Fracking,” Kathleen Dean Moore posits there is a “human right to the material conditions of ongoing life, including clean water, clean air, and nontoxic soil.”[1] She describes the insatiable and constant taking of the fracking industry, demanding “land, livelihood, public property, private property, highway rights of way, democracy, health, sea beds, birdsong, silence, and the thriving of our children.”</div><div>
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</div><div>So, then, how does (or should) the law restrain fracking, which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has called “history seeming to repeat itself: an industry, offering the very real prospect of jobs and other important economic benefits, seek[ing] to exploit” public resources?[2]</div><div>
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</div><div>The public trust doctrine, an ancient but evolving principle, shifts the legal paradigm from one of political discretion to one of fiduciary obligation. Thisprinciple “ranks so fundamental to citizens” that scholars commonly describe it as protecting core human rights.[3]</div><div>
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</div><div>Statutory discretion in natural resource management</div><div>
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</div><div>In the 1970s, at the inception of the modern environmental era, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Forest Management Act, and other key statutes in response to broad public demands for regulation. Over the ensuing decades, however, powerful industries have largely captured regulatory agencies, bending such agencies to industries’ own economic interests. Whereas Congress passed environmental statutes with the overriding goal of protecting the environment, the environmental agencies now predominantly use the statutes to legalize destruction of the environment. For example, as a 2006 Congressional Research Service brief revealed, less than 0.3 percent of the 85,000 yearly wetlands permit applications are denied under the Clean Water Act.[4]</div><div>
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</div><div>Congress too promotes environmental damage. The Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains the now-infamous “Halliburton Loophole,” which essentially exempts fracking from the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and CERCLA.</div><div>
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</div><div>Unable to rely on federal agency or congressional protection, some local governments have taken measures to curtail fracking within their limited jurisdictional boundaries. In some states, like Colorado, the Supreme Court has ruled that local fracking bans are preempted when there is a conflicting state statute.[5] But in Pennsylvania, a state with an Environmental Rights Amendment to the constitution, the Supreme Court ruled that the legislature could not enact laws preventing protections of “resources essential to life, health, and liberty.”[6] In a plurality opinion, Chief Justice Castille wrote that the local governments had a public trust duty to safeguard essential resources, and that the state legislature could not deprive the local government of the means to carry out that duty. The reasoning applies to other states as well. The Public Trust Doctrine, as a fundamental attribute of sovereignty, offers a different legal framework in which political discretion succumbs to fiduciary obligation.</div><div>
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</div><div>The public trust principle</div><div>
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</div><div>The Public Trust Doctrine dates to the ancient Roman Institutes of Justinian. The doctrine has three tenets: government is trustee, current and future generations of citizens are co-beneficiaries, and crucial natural resources comprise the corpus of an enduring ecological trust. In the seminal American Public Trust Doctrine case, Illinois Central Railroad, Co. v. Illinois, the United States Supreme Court said that lands below navigable waters (the traditional trust property) are held in trust by the government because they are “a subject of public concern to the whole people of the State.”[7] Likewise, ground waters, air, and atmosphere—resources threatened by fracking—are essential to the citizenry.</div><div>
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</div><div>The trust principle has constitutional underpinnings and carries the legal force necessary to overcome even statutory law in compelling circumstances. As trustee, all levels of government must abide by fiduciary duties, some of which require affirmative action, whereas others proscribe certain actions.</div><div>
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</div><div>Case law reflects trust duties that are both substantive and procedural. The six substantive duties require a trustee to: (1) protect the corpus; (2) conserve the natural inheritance of future generations; (3) maximize the societal value of natural resources; (4) restore the trust corpus where it has been damaged; (5) recover natural resource damages from third parties that have injured public trust assets; and (6) refrain from privatizing trust resources except in limited circumstances.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/scotus-isnt-only-court-we-should-be-worried-about-trumps-america</div><div>
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</div><div>capt 12/16</div><div>
</div><div>See RICO tobacco and GW</div><div>
</div><div>kids win big in Wa Or, Mass</div><div>
</div><div>http://ecowatch.com/2016/05/17/mass-climate-change-lawsuit/</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.globalpossibilities.org/landmark-human-rights-case-against-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-firms-pushes-on/</div><div>
</div><div>Landmark Human Rights Case Against World’s Biggest Fossil Fuel Firms Pushes On</div><div>
</div><div>Dec 29, 2016 by Casey Coates Danson</div><div>
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</div><div>Environment</div><div>This is the first-ever human rights violations case due to climate injustice alleged against carbon majors.</div><div>By Ping Manongdo / Eco-Business</div><div>December 24, 2016</div><div>
</div><div>The Philippines Commission on Human Rights has announced that it is moving forward with the next steps in the world’s first-ever case against major fossil fuel companies for alleged human rights abuses.</div><div>
</div><div>The commission is to take to task oil giants such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Total, BHP Billiton, Suncor and ConocoPhillips for their alleged role in causing death and financial loss on a massive scale as a result of climate-induced disasters in the archipelago.</div><div>
</div><div>A month after concluding the first phase of their investigation, which looked at scientific evidence linking climate change and fossil fuel operations, CHR commissioner Roberto Eugenio T. Cadiz, who leads the national investigative body for the case, said they are now ready to push forward with public hearings, beginning in April 2017.</div><div>
</div><div>Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) devastation. Many houses were wiped out by container vans that were pushed by the typhoon from a nearby port in Tacloban, Leyte, Philippines. Image: Asian Development Bank, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0</div><div>
</div><div>Cadiz said they have secured responses from 20 out of the 47 fossil fuel companies involved in the case as of December 8.</div><div>
</div><div>The responses were either sent to CHR directly or to the Business and Human Rights Resource Center (BHRRC), a New York-based advocacy group that tracks the human rights policies and performance of businesses.</div><div>
</div><div>In a letter addressed to BHRRC, American company ConocoPhillips, which claims to be the world’s largest independent oil and natural gas exploration and production company, said they challenged the jurisdiction of the legal proceedings arguing that their company does not have operations in the Philippines.</div><div>
</div><div>“We operate responsibly and take climate change issues seriously; managing greenhouse gas emissions in our operations and integrating climate-change related activities and goals into our business planning,” Sabrina Watkins, ConocoPhillips’ head of sustainable development, said in the statement.</div><div>
</div><div>Repsol, a global energy producer based in Madrid, confirmed in a letter sent to BHRRC on November 8, that they sent a reply to the CHR but are unable to disclose details due to the confidentiality rules of the government body.</div><div>
</div><div>Russian company Lukoil for their part said that they have now developed and are implementing what they call a Biodiversity Protection Program focused on “undoing harm” to marine resources and “reclaiming oil contaminated land.”</div><div>
</div><div>The company further said that it has been aiming to prevent water pollution by using “zero pollution” technology in its off-shore operations since 1997. With this technology, not a single item of waste will pass into the water, the company said in a statement.</div><div>
</div><div>The CHR said the petitioners would be ready with a consolidated response by February 14, 2017.</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>win monsanto australia</div><div>
</div><div>http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/12/monsanto-lawsuit-gmo-contamination/</div><div></div><div>
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</div><div>http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/05/heathrow-13-climate-prisoners/</div><div>
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</div><div>Later this month, a judge in the UK is set to jail 13 non-violent protestors who occupied one of the runways at London Heathrow in July last year.</div><div>
</div><div>The protest, the first ever on a Heathrow runway, lasted six hours and caused the delay or cancellation of some 25 flights.</div><div>
</div><div>A judge in the UK is set to jail 13 non-violent protestors who occupied one of the runways at London Heathrow in July last year.</div><div>It was carried out by activists from Plane Stupid, who are opposed to airport expansion.</div><div>
</div><div>In their trial last month the activists—known as the Heathrow 13—tried to argue the “necessity defense” in that their actions were necessary due to the “airport’s contribution to life-threatening climate change.”</div><div>
</div><div>It is the same defense that the so-called Delta 5 used recently in the U.S. after they blocked a crude by oil terminal in Washington State.</div><div>
</div><div>But whereas the judge in the Delta 5 trial praised the defendants for being “part of the solution to the problem of climate change” and “quite frankly, the kind of tireless advocates we need in this country,” the judge in the Heathrow 13 trial sees it very differently.</div><div>
</div><div>#ClimateTrial of the #Delta5 -brave activists argue that blocking crude oil train WAS necessary to defend climate https://t.co/KDnNJPOYOk</div><div>
</div><div>— RAN (@RAN) January 12, 2016</div><div>
</div><div>At the end of last month, the judge convicted the 13 of aggravated trespass and being airside without lawful authority. She asked them to return in three weeks on Feb. 24 for sentencing. The defendants have been told to prepare for immediate custodial sentences.</div><div>
</div><div>They could spend up to three months in prison.</div><div>
</div><div>In response to their convictions, the Heathrow 13 issued a statement:</div><div>
</div><div>“Today’s judgement demonstrates that the legal system does not yet recognize that climate defense is not an offense. We took action because we saw that it was sorely needed. When the democratic, legislative and processes have failed, it takes the actions of ordinary people to change them.”</div><div>
</div><div>There is now a growing campaign to urge the judge to reconsider: Today’s Independent newspaper reports how the judge is being “urged not to act on her threat to jail 13 peaceful environmental protesters—as campaigners warn that the British legal system’s long-standing tolerance towards non-violent direct action is under threat.”</div><div>
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</div><div>Late last night, King County Superior Court Judge Hollis R. Hill issued a groundbreaking ruling in the unprecedented case of eight youth petitioners who requested that the Washington Department of Ecology write a carbon emissions rule that protects the atmosphere for their generation and those to come....“In this important ruling, Judge Hill has made it very clear what [the Department of] Ecology must do when promulgating the Clean Air Rule: preserve, protect and enhance air quality for present and future generations and uphold the constitutional rights of these young people,” said Western Environmental Law Center attorney Andrea Rodgers. “We will hold Ecology accountable every step of the way to make sure that Judge Hill’s powerful words are put into action. This is a huge victory for our children and for the climate movement. To Gov. Inslee, we hope you take this message with you to Paris and heed Judge Hill’s finding that ‘if ever there were a time to recognize through action this right to preservation of a healthful and pleasant environment, the time is now.’”</div><div>
</div><div>This case is one of several similar state and international cases, all supported by Our Children’s Trust, seeking the legal right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate. Cases brought by youth to protect the atmosphere are pending before trial judges in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Colorado, and before appellate courts in Massachusetts and Oregon...</div><div>
</div><div>http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/stem-tide-climate-change/</div><div>
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</div><div>http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/20/stem-tide-climate-change/</div><div>
</div><div>WA state:&nbsp; In a landmark decision, Judge Hill declared “[the youths’] very survival depends upon the will of their elders to act now, decisively and unequivocally, to stem the tide of global warming … before doing so becomes first too costly and then too late.”</div><div>
</div><div>Highlighting inextricable relationships between navigable waters and the atmosphere, and finding that separating the two is “nonsensical,” the judge found the public trust doctrine mandates that the state act through its designated agency “to protect what it holds in trust.” The court confirmed what the Washington youth and youth across the nation have been arguing in courts of law, that “[t]he state has a constitutional obligation to protect the public’s interest in natural resources held in trust for the common benefit of the people.”</div><div>
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</div><div>http://carbonmajors.org/download-the-study/</div><div>
</div><div>A few weeks ago the first ever human rights legal action seeking the accountability of the 50 big polluters was launched. Filed by Filipino typhoon survivors and several environmental organizations, it demands that the Philippines Human Rights Commission (CHR) investigate and acknowledge the complicity of 50 investor-owned fossil fuel companies in causing extreme weather events....</div><div>
</div><div>The top 50 investor-owned polluters under public scrutiny are taken from a list of 90 entitieswho, according to a report by Rick Heede, are responsible for 63 percent of the carbon dioxide and methane emitted between 1751 and 2010.</div><div>
</div><div>Coalitions of affected communities are developing jurisprudence that recognizes impacts of climate change as a breach of human rights. If successful, this recognition will lay the foundations for what is really required: attribution and action.</div><div>
</div><div>The petition was submitted on behalf of Greenpeace Southeast Asia, the Philippine Rural Reconstruction Movement and other local NGOs, with the support of the International Trade Union Confederation, Amnesty International, NGO legal experts and thousands of individuals. The broad coalition was put together because success in fighting climate change will only occur when organizations and individuals join hands across the globe to demand climate justice.</div><div>
</div><div>--</div><div>
</div><div>Rather than attribute emissions to nations, the study aggregates historical emissions according to carbon producing entities themselves. Heede concludes that nearly two-thirds of carbon dioxide emitted since the 1750s can be traced to the 90 largest fossil fuel and cement producers, most of which still operate. online</div><div>
</div><div>The research attributes 63 percent of the carbon dioxide and methane emitted between 1751 and 2010 to just 90 entities. Fifty are investor-owned companies such as Chevron, Peabody, Shell, and BHP Billiton. Thirty-one are state-owned companies such as Saudi Aramco and Statoil, and nine are government-run industries in countries such as China, Poland, and the former Soviet Union. The research also classified the 90 entities according to type of fossil fuel extracted and marketed.</div><div>
</div><div>There are 56 oil and natural gas companies, and 37 coal producers. In addition, the CO2 emissions from seven cement manufacturers are included.</div><div>
</div><div>Top 20 investor- and state-owned entities and attributed CO2 & CH4 emissions 2010</div><div>
</div><div>Entity<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>2010 EmissionsMtCO2e<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Cumulative 1854-2010MtCO2e<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>Percent of Global1751-2010</div><div>1. Chevron, USA<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>423<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>51,096<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>3.52%</div><div>2. ExxonMobil, USA<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>655<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>46,672<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>3.22%</div><div>3. Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1,550<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>46,033<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>3.17%</div><div>4. BP, UK<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>554<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>35,837<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>2.47%</div><div>5. Gazprom, Russian Federation<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1,371<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>32,136<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>2.22%</div><div>6. Royal Dutch/Shell, Netherlands<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>478<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>30,751<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>2.12%</div><div>7. National Iranian Oil Company<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>867<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>29,084<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>2.01%</div><div>8. Pemex, Mexico<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>602<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>20,025<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1.38%</div><div>9. ConocoPhillips, USA<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>359<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>16,866<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1.16%</div><div>10. Petroleos de Venezuela<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>485<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>16,157<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1.11%</div><div>11. Coal India<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>830<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>15,493<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1.07%</div><div>12. Peabody Energy, USA<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>519<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>12,432<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.86%</div><div>13. Total, France<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>398<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>11,911<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.82%</div><div>14. PetroChina, China<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>614<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>10,564<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.73%</div><div>15. Kuwait Petroleum Corp.<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>323<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>10,503<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.73%</div><div>16. Abu Dhabi NOC, UAE<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>387<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>9,672<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.67%</div><div>17. Sonatrach, Algeria<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>386<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>9,263<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.64%</div><div>18. Consol Energy, Inc., USA<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>160<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>9,096<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.63%</div><div>19. BHP-Billiton, Australia<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>320<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>7,606<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.52%</div><div>20. Anglo American, United Kingdom<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>242<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>7,242<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>0.50%</div><div>Top 20 IOCs & SOEs<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>11,523<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>428,439<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>29.54%</div><div>Top 40 IOCs & SOEs<span style="white-space:pre"> </span></div><div>546,767<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>37.70%</div><div>All 81 IOCs & SOEs<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>18,524<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>602,491<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>41.54%</div><div>Total 90 Carbon Majors<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>27,946<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>914,251<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>63.04%</div><div>Total Global Emissions<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>36,026<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>1,450,332<span style="white-space:pre"> </span>100.00%</div><div></div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.alternet.org/environment/kids-win-landmark-climate-battle-against-washington-state-government</div><div>
</div><div>Kids Win Landmark Climate Battle Against Washington State Government</div><div>
</div><div>For the first time in the U.S., a court of law has ordered a state agency to consider the best available science when deciding to regulate CO2 emissions.</div><div>
</div><div>By Deirdre Fulton / Common Dreams June 26, 2015</div><div>
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</div><div>Citing what she called the "historical lack of political will to respond adequately to the urgent and dire acceleration of global warming," a judge in Washington state handed a group of eight young petitioners a landmark win this week, ordering the Department of Ecology (ECY) to consider statewide reductions in carbon dioxide emissions based on best available science.</div><div>
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</div><div>"The effect of this decision is that for the first time in the United States, a court of law has ordered a state agency to consider the most current and best available climate science when deciding to regulate carbon dioxide emissions," said Andrea Rodgers of the Western Environmental Law Center, attorney for the youth petitioners, who are in elementary, middle, and high school.</div><div>
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</div><div>The kids acted with the help of a NASA climate scientist as well as Our Children's Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit orchestrating a global, youth-driven legal campaign to establish the right to a healthy atmosphere and stable climate</div><div>
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</div><div>Big Picture:&nbsp; SCOTUS courts grew into role on Const with Marbury v Madison; after Civil War corps, esp railroads at times got courts to expandtheir powerv maybe some reverals in New Deal (hence ct "packing")</div><div>
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</div><div>Powell called for right mirror to ACLU (tho see Citizen United)&nbsp; also national republican lawyers org</div><div>
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</div><div>Tort Reform part of Defund the Left; but scotus has undermined class action lawsuits; corps rig rules at state/fed level, overruling local/cty ordinances</div><div>
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</div><div>scotus gives personhood rights to corps, which allows them to lie, control info, use "takings" to scare green regulations</div><div>
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</div><div>Also, corps have huge expensive law firms to SLAPP activists</div><div>
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</div><div>Also Coors et al funded legal foundations (often in concert with wise use, since the green used clean air, water, esa) to force gov't and corps to protect ppl and environment.</div><div>
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</div><div>Until Bork, judge appt based on basic competence; nuke option</div><div>
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</div><div>Legal firms become buffer (lobbyist [govt affairs]</div><div>
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</div><div>FREE judge dude ranch Montana</div><div>
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</div><div>5/15</div><div>
</div><div>Last month the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Williams-Yulee v. The Florida Bar, upholding a Florida law that bans judges and judicial candidates from personally soliciting campaign donations. At issue was public confidence in the judiciary, given that lawyers and potential litigants are more likely than average citizens to donate to judges' campaigns.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>"Campaign contributions can create an appearance and risk of favoritism," saidMatthew Menendez, counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a legal watchdog group housed at the New York University School of Law.</div><div>
</div><div>In 2009, Florida judicial candidate Lanell Williams-Yulee signed a letter asking for campaign contributions. The Florida Supreme Court reprimanded and fined Williams-Yulee for violating the state law banning such a solicitation; Williams-Yulee appealed, arguing that the ruling violated her free speech rights. After the case made it to the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, asserted that a judicial candidate's First Amendment rights are not compromised by "a narrowly tailored restriction like the one at issue here."</div><div>
</div><div>The map below shows whether each U.S. state holds judicial elections and, if so, whether the state bans solicitation of campaign contributions by judges and to what degree.</div><div>
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</div><div>Today 39 states hold some kind of election for judges. Of those, 25 states* including Florida place broad limits on personal solicitation of campaign contributions by judicial candidates, while five have more narrow bans. The Supreme Court's decision upholds all 30 of these restrictions.</div><div>
</div><div>The ruling also opens the door for similar laws in the nine states that hold judicial elections but do not prohibit judges from soliciting campaign cash. Four of those states are in the South, the most of any U.S. region; they are Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas. The Brennan Center plans to focus attention on these nine states in an effort to pass bans there; it will also advocate for other initiatives that make judicial elections more democratic such as public financing of candidates and reforming judicial selection.</div><div>
</div><div>Such reforms have become even more critical since the Supreme Court's 2010Citizens United decision, which dramatically increased money in judicial elections by allowing unlimited donations to outside groups. In a pollcommissioned by the Brennan Center and Justice at Stake, nearly 90 percent of voters said they think fundraising and money in judicial elections are affecting judges' decisions on the bench.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/The-Lewis-Powell-Memo/judicial/</div><div>
</div><div>Lewis Powell saw that corporate interests could gain greatly by using the judicial system to their advantage, yet to make the judiciary more sympathetic to business interests, he knew corporations would have to plan and engage in a long-term, multi-dimensional strategy.</div><div>The Powell Memo on Judicial Influence:</div><div>"[T]he judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic and political change. [...] This is a vast area of opportunity for the Chamber, if it is willing to undertake the role of spokesman for American business and if, in turn, business is willing to provide the funds. As with respect to scholars and speakers, the Chamber would need a highly competent staff of lawyers. In special situations it should be authorized to engage, to appear as counsel amicus in the Supreme Court, lawyers of national standing and reputation. The greatest care should be exercised in selecting the cases in which to participate, or the suits to institute. But the opportunity merits the necessary effort."</div><div>
</div><div>(Direct link to this quote in the Powell Memo)</div><div>
</div><div>The big business reaction to Lewis Powell’s judicial and legal strategy was swift. Within a few years, nearly a dozen corporate-funded legal foundations were created. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) was formed in California in 1973 to counter public-interest law firms and represent the interests of business and private property holders against environmental regulations. PLF’s prospectus quoted the Powell memo at length. (Kim Phillips-Fein, “Invisible Hands,” p. 162).</div><div>
</div><div>When asked for his opinion of the “most critical” area of public interest law, PLF’s then-executive legal director replied, “environmental law,” citing the firm’s support for the use of DDT, the construction of a dam and reservoir project, the use of herbicides in national forests and the use of public grazing lands without environmental impact review. The early cases established a clear pattern for PLF and its followers at the Mountain States Legal Foundation and other regionally named corporate defenders. Environmental cases would be a priority and the foundations’ positions in such cases would invariably be those of their business benefactors, including Monsanto, Weyerhaeuser, Gulf Oil, ARCO, Ford and other companies (Houck, "With Charity for All," pp. 1461-1462). The work of these groups also supported the Wise Use movement; radical property rights activists and corporate front groups that attacked environmental laws and regulations on behalf of landowners, ranchers and the oil industry (Helvarg, The War Against the Greens).</div><div>
</div><div>The conservative backlash against alleged liberal influence over the law went well beyond the corporate agenda that grew directly out of Powell’s analysis, but there were also tensions between the two. Corporate legal campaigns were primarily self-interested, practical and designed to get both immediate and longer-term results. The conservative legal movement that got its start in the 1970s was more ideologically driven; its greatest successes would take decades, and sometimes came about through indirect means (Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement).</div><div>
</div><div>At the juncture between these two was the “law and economics” school, with leading proponents such as Richard Posner at the University of Chicago and George Mason University’s Henry Manne. Manne organized seminars for federal judges through his Law and Economics Center, with support from the Olin Foundation, which also backed some of the leading “second generation” conservative public policy law firms, like the Center for Individual Rights. The foundation’s chairman, John M Olin, was inspired by Powell’s memo to write to William Baroody at the American Enterprise Institute: “The Powell Memorandum gives a reason for a well organized effort to re-establish the validity and importance of the American free enterprise system.” (“Invisible Hands,” Kim Phillips-Fein)</div><div>
</div><div>For its part, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce also eventually followed Powell’s advice by creating two legal groups that have carried out a multi-decade legal strategy -- the National Chamber Litigation Center (NCLC) and the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR). NCLC served as the Chamber’s law firm, using aggressive and strategic litigation to challenge regulations and laws. Entering 134 new cases of significance to the business community in 2009, for example, the NCLC helped to secure 52 victories.</div><div>
</div><div>The Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) coordinated one of the Chamber’s flagship priorities in the post-Powell era -- the push for “tort reform.” The tort 'reform' campaign was so successful that by 2006, the American Lawyer proclaimed, “It’s Over,” explaining that “the power of the plaintiffs bar is on the wane in this country, and will be for a long time to come.” ILR, along with the American Tort Reform Association (funded by the tobacco, chemical and drug industries, along with the American Medical Association), created a “public relations masterpiece” that demonized trial lawyers, replaced state judges hostile to business interests, and mobilized popular support for business-friendly laws. (See Frankel, “It’s Over”) The campaign erected a variety of judicial and regulatory barriers against plaintiff attorneys and their clients – i.e., the victims of corporate crime and malfeasance -- including caps on punitive and non-economic damages, the abolition of “joint and several liability,” and limits on class action lawsuits.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>This push for tort 'reform' has also been a legal priority for various industries. According to a document produced by one corporate law firm, for instance, the tobacco industry’s tort reform budget for 1995 alone was $21.8 million (see Covington & Burling Tort Reform Project Budget).</div><div>
</div><div>The U.S. Chamber has used the momentum built by decades of successful tort reform to brazenly argue for policies that would shield corporations from having to pay when they are responsible for cases of massive damage. For instance, after the 2010 BP Horizon disaster the Chamber arguedthat the $75 million liability cap should not be lifted retroactively to make BP pay for damages from the oil gusher. This position drew criticism from a variety of expert observers, including Ken Feinberg, the manager of BP’s oil spill compensation fund.</div><div>
</div><div>Some of the landmark changes in the law that have come about through support from business and conservative interests in recent decades have been used to bolster other strategies outlined by Powell in his memo. An example is the dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine for media, which was introduced to ensure public interest voices would balance commercial interests as part of the bargain for corporate broadcasters' free license to use the People’s airwaves.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Another significant shift in the law since Powell’s memo was circulated has been the gradual expansion of corporate constitutional rights (referred to by some business groups as “business civil liberties”), especially in the realms of commercial and political speech. The most infamous example is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In the commercial sphere, companies have similarly used corporate speech doctrines to challenge various restrictions on corporate advertising (e.g. direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs for off-label uses), limits on media ownership, and product safety labeling requirements (e.g. cigarettes and genetically modified foods).</div><div>
</div><div>Corporate constitutional rights are regularly claimed (with the implicit threat of litigation) in opposition to new or proposed regulations. One recent example came during recent attacks on regulations created by the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, which contained a provision requiring that companies report their use of tin, gold and other minerals that can be traced back to the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of the Congo. In its comments to the SEC, Tiffany & Co. claimed the SEC rules would “compel speech in a manner that violates the First Amendment.”</div><div>
</div><div>References and More Information:</div><div>Nan Aron, "Justice for Sale: Shortchanging The Public Interest for Private Gain.” Washington, DC: Alliance for Justice, 1993.</div><div>
</div><div>Oliver A. Houck, “With Charity for All,” Yale Law Journal, Volume 93, No. 8, July 1984. More information available at: http://research.greenpeaceusa.org/?a=view&d=6000.</div><div>
</div><div>Steven M. Teles, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law. Princeton University Press, 2008. More information available at:http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Rise_of_the_Conservative_Legal_Movem.html?id=MTps-NK20jAC.</div><div>
</div><div>Alison Frankel, “It’s Over: Tort reformers, business interests, and plaintiffs lawyers themselves have helped kill the mass torts bonanza.” The American Lawyer, December 1, 2006. Available at:http://www.law.com/jsp/PubArticle.jsp?id=1165320496651.</div><div>
</div><div>Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: Norton, 2009. More information available at:http://books.google.com/books/about/Invisible_hands.html?id=CcU7z9jLqXcC.</div><div>
</div><div>David Helvarg, The War Against the Greens. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994. More information available at: http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Greens-Wise-Use-Movement/dp/1555663281.</div><div>
</div><div>Covington & Burling Tort Reform Project Budget, Budget, October 3, 1995, available in the Tobacco Legacy Documents’ online archive at: http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/khu28d00.</div><div>
</div><div>Robert Weissman, “First Amendment Follies,” Multinational Monitor, May, 1998. Available at:http://www.multinationalmonitor.org/mm1998/98may/corp3.html.</div><div>
</div><div>Patrick Dorsey, Sr. VP and General Counsel of Tiffany & Co., comments to the SEC, dated February 22, 2011. Available at: http://www.sec.gov/comments/df-title-xv/specialized-disclosures/specializeddisclosures-17.pdf.</div><div>
</div><div>Robert L Kerr, The Rights of Corporate Speech: Mobil Oil and the Legal Development of the Voice of Big Business, LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2005. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Rights-Corporate-Speech-Development-Scholarship/dp/1593320701.</div><div>
</div><div>Robert L Kerr, The Corporate Free-Speech Movement: Cognitive Feudalism and the Endangered Marketplace of Ideas, LFB Scholarly Publishing, 2008. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Free-speech-Movement-Endangered-Marketplace/dp/1593322933.</div><div>
</div><div>Stephanie Mencimer,Blocking the Courthouse Door: How the Republican Party and Its Corporate Allies are Taking Away Your Right to Sue. NY: Free Press, 2011. More information available at:http://www.amazon.com/Blocking-Courthouse-Door-Republican-Corporate/dp/0743277007.</div><div>
</div><div>Chris Young, "Corporations, pro-business nonprofits foot bill for judicial seminars," Center for Public Integrity, March 28, 2013.</div><div>
</div><div>People for the American Way, "The Rise of the Corporate Court." (2010)</div><div>
</div><div>Community Rights Counsel, "Using Federal Courts to Attack Community and Environmental Protections"</div><div>
</div><div>Commonweal Institute:&nbsp; "Conservative Movement" web site.</div><div>
</div><div>The American Constitution Society&nbsp; and the Alliance for Justice are two groups that organize lawyers, students and others to push back against the pro-corporate conservative legal movement that has undermined community and environmental rights. Be sure to read Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) speech to the ACS 2013 annual convention, "Corporate Capture of The Federal Courts"&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>To understand how far the courts have moved away from environmental protections, we recommend Christopher's Stone's book "Should Trees Have Standing" or the law review it is based upon, which was cited by Justice William O. Douglas in his famous dissenting opinion in the Mineral King decision -- Sierra Club v. Morton 405 U.S. 727. Douglas argued that natural resources ought to have standing to pursue their own protection.&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>several articles:</div><div>
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</div><div>Mother Jones</div><div>
</div><div>Is Your Judge for Sale?</div><div>
</div><div>Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, judicial elections have been overtaken by secretive interest groups, nasty ads, and the constant hustle for campaign cash.</div><div>
</div><div>By Andy Kroll | Tue Oct. 28, 2014 6:00 AM EDT</div><div>
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</div><div>Social Title:&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Thanks to Karl Rove and Citizens United, your judge may be for sale</div><div>
</div><div>Social Dek:&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Inside America's increasingly tainted judicial elections</div><div>
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</div><div>The 30-second TV spot is stark and brutal. First it shows the bespectacled face of candidate Louis Butler, then a grainy mug shot of an ex-con. "Louis Butler worked to put criminals on the street," the narrator warns [1], "like Reuben Lee Mitchell, who raped an 11-year-old girl with learning disabilities." After Mitchell's release from prison, the narrator continues, he raped again. "Can Wisconsin families feel safe with Louis Butler?"</div><div>
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</div><div>This attack ad wasn't from a bitterly fought congressional race. It was from a 2008 campaign for state Supreme Court justice—a position that until recently was considered above the fray of partisan politics. Butler, the first African American Supreme Court justice in Wisconsin history, was defending his seat against a trial court judge whose campaign tactic recalled the GOP's infamous Willie Horton hit job on Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Long before ascending to his state's highest court, Butler had been assigned as Reuben Lee Mitchell's public defender—he wasn't the judge in the case, as the nasty ad implied.</div><div>
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</div><div>Butler's opponent, Michael Gableman, had been showered with campaign donations from business leaders, who were keenly aware of Butler's role in two decisions. One was a 4-3 ruling to strike down a $350,000 limit on so-called pain-and-suffering damages [2] in malpractice suits. The other held that if an individual harmed by lead paint exposure couldn't identify the producer, then multiple paint companies could be held liable under a legal theory known as "risk contribution [3].</div><div>
</div><div>[4]</div><div>
</div><div>Read our graphical explainer [4] on how dark money is taking over judicial elections.</div><div>
</div><div>While Butler's and Gableman's campaigns spent a combined total of $1.2 million on the race, outside groups aligned with the US Chamber of Commerce and the state's labor unions spent $3.6 million, funding 89 percent of all the TV ads. Butler was the first sitting justice to get booted from the court in 40 years.</div><div>
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</div><div>By 2011, with Wisconsin reeling from political battles over Gov. Scott Walker's union-busting agenda, the next Supreme Court race was equally ugly. This time it was conservative Justice David Prosser defending his seat; a misleading ad [5] from a partisan group backing his opponent claimed that Prosser, as a district attorney in 1978, had helped cover up sexual abuse of two young boys at the hands of a Catholic priest. (The abuse had only emerged years later; the victims called the ad "offensive, inaccurate, and out of context.")</div><div>
</div><div>Although Prosser successfully defended his seat, he says that the election—which saw nearly $5 million in total campaign spending—poisoned relationships on the court. The tension boiled over weeks later, when Prosser and Ann Walsh Bradley, a liberal justice, engaged in an argument that got physical as four of their fellow justices looked on. Bradley claimed Prosser choked her, while Prosser said he raised his hands in self-defense as Bradley charged at him. In police interviews [6], two conservative justices sided with Prosser, and two liberal justices with Bradley. Investigations by the county sheriff, the local DA, and a special independent prosecutor all cleared Prosser of any wrongdoing, but the controversy still festers. When I spoke with Prosser in September, written in chalk on the sidewalk outside the state Capitol was an invitation to visit him for "free chokes."</div><div>
</div><div>"They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that," says former Iowa Supreme Court Justice Marsha Ternus.</div><div>
</div><div>Bitter, costly judicial elections are by no means unique to Wisconsin. These days, as more candidates for the bench face rough contests—buffeted increasingly by outside money, thanks to the US Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United—state judges around the country often raise six- and seven-figure sums, mount statewide campaigns, and fend off attack ads from groups that don't disclose their donors. This trend has escalated over the last decade and a half as partisan groups realize that donating to judges can get them more influence, for less money, than bankrolling legislative campaigns. After all, the donors often end up with business before the very judges they are helping elect.</div><div>
</div><div>These are also the judges that most citizens who interact with the system have to face. Can Americans still trust in getting their fair day in court.</div><div>
</div><div>Court cases that make big news are usually in the federal system, where most judges are appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Yet the vast majority of justice is done at the state level, where more than 100 million cases are filed annually (versus about 400,000 in federal courts). The nation's approximately 30,000 state court judges vastly outnumber their federal counterparts, and 85 percent of them will stand in at least one election during their career.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>No two states pick their judges exactly the same way. Some hold partisan judicial elections, others have nonpartisan elections, and still others use merit selection—that's when legal experts select a short list of qualified candidates, the governor appoints one to the bench, and that judge later stands in a retention election.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The system has its roots in the Panic of 1837, a mini-depression fueled by rampant cronyism and massive overspending by corrupt governors and legislatures. Partisan elections replaced the tradition of elected officials appointing their friends to the bench, but for decades connections and loyalty still mattered most, with party bosses determining who won. Eventually states embraced nonpartisan elections and merit selection, and for most of the 20th century, judicial elections were a little-noticed corner of American politics</div><div>
</div><div>Still, on occasion a contentious race attracted national attention. In 1977, Rose Bird became the first woman appointed to the California Supreme Court and its first female chief justice. An avowed foe of capital punishment, she voted to vacate all 61 death penalty verdicts that came before her, prompting Republican Gov. George Deukmejian to label her a "soft-on-crime liberal." With Bird up for retention in 1986, oil and agribusiness companies, which generally saw Bird's liberal views as a threat to their interests, poured more than $5.6 million into a campaign that would unseat her. It was an early glimpse of a reliable strategy for big business: Using the soft-on-crime theme to oust judges considered unfriendly to corporations.</div><div>
</div><div>Around that time, a political consultant by the name of Karl Rove was plotting his own assault on the Texas Supreme Court. Rove had helped launch the "tort wars" in response to what some Republicans saw as a court system too cozy with trial lawyers and too eager to slam corporations with hefty judgments that Rove had dubbed "junk lawsuits [7]."</div><div>
</div><div>Running on the slogan "Clean Slate '88," conservative candidates backed by Rove's operation won five of the six open seats on the Texas Supreme Court. Not long after, Rove teamed up with the Business Council of Alabama to engineer a similar Republican takeover in that state.</div><div>
</div><div>Direct spending on supreme court races, 2000-14</div><div>
</div><div>Two years later, the US Chamber of Commerce, under the leadership of an aggressive new president named Tom Donohue, picked up on Rove's strategy. Pledging to "play hardball" against "frivolous" lawsuits, the Chamber spent $10 million on judicial races in 2000 alone. It pumped $4.4 million into Ohio's Supreme Court election—the largest expenditure from a single source on a court race in US history. In the following years, the Chamber injected tens of millions into races in Illinois, Michigan, Mississippi, and Wisconsin. Corporate America had grasped the potential to install friendly judges who could crack down on costly class actions and neutralize the efforts of consumer advocates. "We're clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat," as Donohue put it, "and we've got to step it up if we're going to survive."</div><div>
</div><div>Unions spent millions on these races as well—particularly across the Upper Midwest, as labor leaders recognized they could get a great return on investment by backing justices sympathetic to workers' rights. As an official with the Ohio AFL-CIO once said: "We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators."</div><div>
</div><div>A major showdown came in 2004, in West Virginia's Supreme Court election. Don Blankenship [8], the former CEO of Massey Energy, donated $3 million to Republican candidate Brent Benjamin. Meanwhile, a nonprofit funded primarily by Massey Energy ran TV ads [9] accusing incumbent Justice Warren McGraw of getting a child rapist out of prison and into a job at a high school. After Benjamin won, the investment paid off big time: He later cast the deciding vote to overturn a lower court's $50 million verdict against Massey Energy. Two years later, the US Supreme Court ruled [10] that Benjamin should have recused himself. It overturned the decision and sent the case back to West Virginia. (Massey Energy ultimately prevailed in state court [11].)</div><div>
</div><div>Corporate interests also reaped a huge return on investment in the 2004 Supreme Court election in Illinois. Five years earlier, a jury had handed down a $1.19 billion penalty [12] to the insurance company State Farm for requiring millions of claimants to accept subpar replacement auto parts. State Farm and its employees—working through the US Chamber, the Illinois Republican Party, and an Illinois-based tort reform group—steered $4 million to elect a sympathetic judge named Lloyd Karmeier to the Supreme Court, which was considering State Farm's appeal of the auto parts verdict. Karmeier, his opponent, and various outside groups spent a record $9.3 million on the race. Karmeier, who would later acknowledge that the sum was "obscene," won easily. And the millions State Farm spent were a pittance compared with what it gained: The next year, Karmeier cast the deciding vote to overturn the more than $1 billion verdict against State Farm.</div><div>
</div><div>Up to this point, the big spenders were mostly targeting contested judicial elections—ones in which a candidate challenged a sitting justice. Then came the Iowa Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Varnum v. Brien [13], in which the seven justices unanimously ruled that the state's ban on same-sex marriage violated the state constitution. Social-conservative groups leapt into action, targeting three of the seven justices who were up for retention election—ones where voters only check "yes" or "no." The National Organization for Marriage and its allies spent nearly $1 million and defeated all three. "They wanted to make sure we were punished for our decision and that other judges witnessed that so they wouldn't do it either," former Justice Marsha Ternus told me.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The strategy of turning sleepy retention elections into political showdowns has been spreading. In Florida's 2012 retention elections, the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the Republican Party of Florida spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to unseat three sitting justices. A group called Defend Justice From Politics spent $3.1 million on the justices' behalf, helping them prevail. In Michigan in 2012, two anonymously funded nonprofits, the Judicial Crisis Network and Americans for Job Security, poured $2.1 million into attack ads against five judges on Michigan's 6th Circuit Court, though the judges won out. And earlier this year, Tennessee's lieutenant governor, Ron Ramsey, took it upon himself to spearhead an effort to unseat three sitting state Supreme Court justices—and, along with them, the attorney general, who is appointed by the court. Ramsey's PAC pumped $425,000 into a group running negative ads [14] that blasted the three justices as "liberal on crime" and for "helping advance Obamacare." Funds were also contributed by Americans for Prosperity and the GOP's State Government Leadership Foundation, which said it planned to spend an additional $5 million in 2014 on judicial races in North Carolina, Tennessee, and elsewhere.</div><div>
</div><div>Though the three Tennessee justices prevailed in the end, one of them, Connie Clark, told me she's concerned about the precedent set by the fight. "As long as there are no limits on outside money," she says, "then this will become the new normal."</div><div>
</div><div>The transformation of judicial campaigns has alarmed another veteran of the court system. "Judicial elections pose a serious threat," former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Mother Jones. "If judicial decisions are in fact not fair and impartial—or even if they are perceived as being biased—the basis of support for our courts crumbles."</div><div>
</div><div>Initially, the 2011-12 election season—the first full cycle since Citizens United—saw a modest dip in overall reported spending on state judicial races, compared to four years earlier. But that is likely because much of the new spending does not have to be disclosed or tracked. This year, for example, Americans for Prosperity-Tennessee announced a "major new effort [15]" to educate the public about the "liberal records" of the three justices—and not a penny of that spending was reported to the state. The outside spending on judicial races that we do know about rose to a record-high $24.9 million—a nearly sevenfold increase since 2000, and now accounting for 40 percent of the total spending on these campaigns.</div><div>
</div><div>Direct vs. outside judicial spending (in 2014 dollars)</div><div>
</div><div>Recent research suggests this flood of political money could be influencing judges' decisions. Emory University analyzed [16] 2,345 state supreme court decisions from all 50 states between 2010 and 2012 and concluded that the more campaign money justices received from business interests, the more likely they were to vote in favor of businesses appearing before them. (Interestingly, the study found a stronger tie between business donations and Democratic justices' decisions. Republican justices, it speculated, were already more favorably inclined toward business interests, so the campaign money didn't make as much of a difference.) Another analysis [17], by the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress, suggested that as more money was spent on soft-on-crime attack ads in campaigns, justices were increasingly siding with the prosecution</div><div>
</div><div>The public may be starting to catch on: A 2013 poll [18] by Justice at Stake, a nonprofit group focused on reforming the system, found that 87 percent of Americans believe that campaign donations could influence court rulings. "You can't expect judges to act like Huey Long on the campaign trail and expect them to be Solomon in the courtroom," says Bert Brandenburg, the group's executive director.</div><div>
</div><div>A case pending before the US Supreme Court could inject even more politics into judicial races. In Lanell Williams-Yulee v. the Florida Bar, a county-level judge wants the nation's high court to strike down laws in 30 states blocking judges from personally asking donors for campaign cash. In those states, treasurers and fundraising consultants typically make the ask on behalf of a judicial candidate. Only nine states currently allow judges to solicit donations directly for their campaigns, but in those states, "the road to victory begins with the solicitation of money," Wallace Jefferson, the former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court, has written. "The 'ask' is undignified, and the 'give' is fairly compelled." For those fighting to insulate judges from electoral politics, the elimination of the fundraising ban would be yet another step in the wrong direction.</div><div>
</div><div>Some researchers dispute the notion that rough-and-tumble judicial elections are a problem. One recent Michigan State University study [19] of supreme court races concluded that attack ads did not hurt incumbents in partisan elections. Other studies [20] found that nonpartisan elections are less likely to draw a challenger, are less competitive even when there is a challenger, and attract fewer voters than partisan elections do.</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>The debate boils down to a fundamental notion: whether the judicial branch of government is unique from the other two and should be insulated from politics. With court integrity hanging in the balance, should judges be chosen the same way we pick presidents and members of Congress</div><div>
</div><div>Randy Shepard, who served as the chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court for 25 years, retired from the court in 2012 as the longest-serving state chief justice in American history. A lifelong Republican in a red state, Shepard has gone through the merit selection process and run in multiple elections. "What's at stake in these big-money elections is the promise of due process and an impartial court," he told me. "Do I as a citizen walk into that courtroom standing on a relatively level playing field?"</div><div>
</div><div>He offered up a hypothetical from a law review article he wrote that, he proudly noted, was cited by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy in the Massey Energy case [10]—the one where the high court ruled that a judge who'd received massive campaign contributions connected to a company had to recuse himself from a case involving that company. "Say you're going before a trial judge making a decision about the custody of your grandchildren, and your evil son-in-law or daughter-in-law had made a very large contribution to the judge. How would you feel about that? You wouldn't feel very optimistic, would you?"</div><div>
</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>chamberwatch</div><div>
</div><div>Generally, plaintiffs’ attorneys represent consumers and workers to help them seek compensation in court for injuries caused by alleged corporate wrongdoing. In the late 1990s, the Chamber launched a well-financed campaign to malign plaintiffs’ attorneys as part of a wider crusade to implement national and international policies that shield corporations from lawsuits.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In 1998, the Chamber founded the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR), now the largest sub-group within the Chamber. More than half of the $44 million the ILR raised in 2012 came from just 21 large donors, with an average donation of more than $450,000. The Chamber does its anti-consumer work through the ILR and through its Coalition to Preserve Arbitration, led by AT&T and comprising trade associations in finance, insurance, car sales and other industries where contracts are complicated and companies often have an advantage in information and expertise.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>One of the ILR’s apparent goals is to further entrench the use of pre-dispute binding arbitration clauses in corporate contracts with consumers and employees. The clauses deny individuals’ right their day in court and require them instead to resolve disputes with corporations in private arbitration proceedings. The ILR funds research that attempts to support the claim that consumers do better in arbitration than in the courts, but more credible research shows that consumers and employeesare less successful in arbitration than in the courts. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that arbitration clauses are prevalent in financial services contracts and that very few consumers use arbitration to resolve financial disputes. Arbitration is an unpopular choice for consumers because it tends to create an unbalanced playing field that favors corporations.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Arbitration clauses in consumer contracts frequently forbid consumers from participating in class actions against the company. As a result, consumer disputes with companies can be arbitrated only on an individual basis, a method that is often impractical because the individual amount at stake is often small, even where the corporation’s total benefit from the challenged conduct is significant. That means consumers are increasingly unable to challenge wrongful corporate conduct. And if consumers can’t seek redress, companies do not have to answer for predatory or illegal practices.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The ILR also works to place articles on “cases and actions that portend to have an impact on business” in widely read publications through its media outfit, the Legal Newsline, founded in 2006.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Further, 39 states elect their high court judges, and from 2001 to 2003, for example, the candidate backed by the Chamber won 21 of 24 judicial elections. In 2004, the Chamber-backed candidate won 12 of 13 state Supreme Court races.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The Chamber gives financial support to the campaigns of state judges it views as aligned with its interests and attacks judges that it views as opposed to its priorities. Business groups spent about $26.2 million in races between 2000 and 2009, and the Chamber was a major player. In 2000, for example, the Mississippi chief justice, whom the Chamber supported but who was concerned about out-of-state influence on the state elections, asked the Chamber to stop running ads for her — but the Chamber ignored her request.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Chamber-identified ads disappeared in the 2002 Mississippi election season, but similar ads were run by the Law Enforcement Alliance of America (LEAA). The LEAA’s donors are secret, but Mississippi Supreme Court Justice Oliver Diaz suspected the Chamber was still at work, saying, “The ads that the U.S. Chamber ran against me in 2000 were extremely similar [to the ones] that the LEAA ran against me in 2008.” The Chamber had run highly negative ads, including accusing Justice Diaz of “voting for drug dealers and baby killers.”&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>“Judges who are running for reelection do keep in mind what the next 30-second ad is going to look like,” Justice Diaz said. A 2013 report by the Center for American Progress found that as campaign cash in judicial elections has increased, courts have begun to rule more often in favor of prosecutors and against criminal defendants.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Fewer numbers are available now than when the wave of spending began around 2000. The Chamber’s state high court spending is becoming increasingly difficult to trace, as observers, including former state supreme court justices, believe it has turned increasingly to spending money through opaque third-party organizations like the LEAA. Additionally, as the Center for Public Integrity notes, “Tracking all outside spending is nearly impossible thanks to lax state disclosure rules, as well as a loophole in the federal tax code that allows politically active nonprofits to run attack ads without disclosing who funds them.”&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In a 2002 speech to the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, U.S. Chamber President Tom Donohue gave some insight into the rise of the Chamber's involvement in judicial elections. Taking aim at trial lawyers who successfully litigated class action lawsuits for people harmed by asbestos and tobacco companies, he said, “Our approach is simple — implement a multi-front strategy of challenging these unscrupulous trial lawyers every time they poke their head out of the ground. … On the political front, we’re going to get involved in key state Supreme Court and attorney general races as part of our effort to elect pro-legal reform judicial candidates.... We’re clearly engaged in hand-to-hand combat, and we’ve got to step it up if we’re going to survive.”&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>&nbsp;=</div><div>
</div><div>5) EDUCATE AND TRAIN (INDOCTRINATE) LEGISLATORS</div><div>
</div><div>Through ALEC, SPN think tanks plan and conduct hundreds of "educational" workshops for legislators that often result in legislative push for a specific agenda. For example, Colorado's Independence Institute gave a report on "public pension reform" at ALEC's 2011 annual meeting, which was followed by renewed efforts to privatize and otherwise alter pensions being introduced in 29 states in that year.</div><div>
</div><div>Moreover, many SPN think tanks hold "legislative forums," seminars, "policy previews," "policy orientations," etc., when their state's legislature begins a new session. Whether called lobbying or not, these events present state legislators with the policy priorities and bills being pushed by the think tanks for that legislative session. Such events have been held by the Montana Policy Institute, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Oregon's Cascade Policy Institute, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Louisiana's Pelican Institute for Public Policy, North Carolina's John William Pope Civitas Institute, New Jersey's Common Sense Institute, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and the Illinois Policy Foundation, according to "SPN News."</div><div>
</div><div>Such events advance corporate interests like privatizing American infrastructure, but are re-framed as "show[ing] lawmakers how to fund transportation infrastructure with private money." Such a framing avoids words like "convince," "persuade," and "lobby."</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>
</div><div>judicial junket update:</div><div>
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</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/03/28/12368/corporations-pro-business-nonprofits-foot-bill-judicial-seminars</div><div>
</div><div>Between July 2008 and 2012, about 185 federal judges attended more than 100 judicial education seminars, sponsored by conservative foundations and multinational corporations like ExxonMobil, Pfizer and BP.</div><div>The Center identified instances where judges who attended seminars underwritten by certain firms and trade groups later issued rulings in the funders’ favor.</div><div>George Mason University’s Law & Economics Center and Northwestern University’s Judicial Education Program hosted more judicial conferences than any other organization or university.</div><div>The Koch Foundation and The Searle Freedom Trust, both major supporters of conservative causes, were sponsors for most of the conferences organized by the two schools.</div><div>The person who spoke at more judicial conferences than any other was Henry Butler, a professor and prominent conservative formerly of Northwestern and now executive director of George Mason’s Law & Economics Center.</div><div>
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</div><div>bp gulf spill NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A federal appeals court panel has reaffirmed its ruling that BP is liable for federal Clean Water Act damages stemming from the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the latest loss for the oil giant as it fights court decisions that could ultimately bring $18 billion in penalties.</div><div>
</div><div>The three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected arguments that there were errors in its June 4 ruling on BP's Clean Water Act liability. The ruling released Wednesday night is not the final say from the court. BP and its minority partner in the Macondo well, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., have a request pending for the full 15-member court to reconsider the issue.</div><div>
</div><div>The June order and Wednesday's follow-up were issued by Judges Fortunato Benavides, Carolyn Dineen King and James Dennis. They upheld U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier's ruling holding the well owners are liable.</div><div>
</div><div>BP and Anadarko had argued they were not liable because equipment failure on the leased rig Deepwater Horizon caused the April 2010 disaster. An explosion on the rig killed 11 workers and sent millions of gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf in what became the nation's worst offshore oil disaster.</div><div>
</div><div>Barbier has also ruled that BP was "grossly negligent" in the disaster. BP has asked Barbier to reconsider that finding, which, if it stands, would be a factor in whether the water act penalties for the company reach an estimated $18 billion.</div><div>
</div><div>Under the Clean Water Act, a polluter can be forced to pay from $1,100 to $4,300 per barrel of spilled oil. The higher limit applies if the company is found grossly negligent — as BP was in Barbier's ruling. But penalties can be assessed at lower amounts.</div><div>
</div><div>Government experts estimated that 4.2 million barrels spilled into the Gulf. BP has urged Barbier to use an estimate of 2.45 million barrels in calculating any Clean Water Act penalties.</div><div>
</div><div>Barbier has scheduled a trial in January to help decide how much BP owes in federal Clean Water Act penalties.</div><div>
</div><div>BP declined comment on the latest ruling. Anadarko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.</div><div>
</div><div>In a June interview, Loyola University law professor Blaine LeCesne said he doubts Anadarko will have to pay much, if anything, in Clean Water Act fines because its partnership gave BP complete control over how the well was drilled and run.</div><div>
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</div><div>note not class action, presumably greg abbot not helpful?</div><div>
</div><div>A jury in Dallas, TX today awarded $2.925 million to plaintiffs Bob and Lisa Parr, who sued Barnett shale fracking company Aruba Petroleum Inc. for&nbsp; intentionally causing a nuisance on the Parr's property which&nbsp; impacted their health and ruined their drinking water.</div><div>
</div><div>The jury returned its 5-1 verdict confirming that Aruba Petroleum “intentionally created a private nuisance” though its drilling, fracking and production activities at 21 gas wells near the Parrs' Wise County home over a three-year period between 2008-2011.</div><div>
</div><div>Plaintiffs attorneys claimed the case is “the first fracking verdict in U.S.history.”&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>Thek New Politics of Judicial Elections, 2011-12: How New Waves of Special Interest Spending Raised the Stakes for Fair Courts</div><div>
</div><div>This collaborative report analyzes the prominent role of special interest money in state supreme court elections. In 2011-12, many of these races “seemed alarmingly indistinguishable from ordinary political campaigns—featuring everything from Super PACs and mudslinging attack ads to millions of dollars of candidate fundraising and independent spending.” http://www.followthemoney.org/</div><div>
</div><div>http://newpoliticsreport.org/</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>
</div><div>older?&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Justice at Risk: An Empirical Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decisions</div><div>
</div><div>Justice at Risk is an empirical research project exploring the relationship between campaign contributions to candidates in state supreme court elections and the votes justices cast in cases while on the court. It concludes that there is a significant relationship between business group contributions to state supreme court justices and the voting of those justices in cases involving business matters. The study, sponsored by the American Constitution Society and designed by experienced independent empirical researchers, utilizes data from the Institute</div><div>
</div><div>The methodology used in the report is available here</div><div>
</div><div>The codebook with the ACS data is available here.</div><div>
</div><div>The datasets are available here.</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>corkery</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Other recipients, such as American Action Network, Americans for Job Security (AJS) and Americans for Prosperity, are notably active in the political ad wars. AJS, for example, which received a combined total of nearly $3 million from Wellspring in 2008 and 2010, spent at least $8.3 million on ads mentioning federal candidates in 2010, and nearly $16 million in 2012. AJS was also involved in a scheme last year that funneled $11 million into efforts to curb the political power of labor unions and prevent a tax increase. California’s campaign finance agency called it political "money laundering" and last month levied $1 million in fines in the case.</div><div>
</div><div>And still other Wellspring recipients train their sights on the judicial branch. The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) -- originally called Judicial Confirmation Network -- was started in 2004 to help build support for former President George W. Bush's federal court nominees. Now it works against Obama's judicial picks -- and Obama himself. According to Federal Election Commission records,</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;JCN spent $571,000 in 2008 opposing Obama's election. JCN also runs ads benefiting conservative state court candidates. According to the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, the group spent more than $1 million airing ads against a Democratic state supreme court candidate in Michigan last year; its target, Bridget Mary McCormack, won despite that. It also spent $1 million on a lower court race – believed to be the first time dark money has been used in a trial court contest.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>
</div><div>As it happens, Neil Corkery is treasurer of JCN. Wellspring, run by his wife, gave the group and its affiliate, the Judicial Education Project, a total of more than $700,000 over a two-year period encompassing 2010 and 2011.&nbsp; ...?</div><div>In 2010 Wellspring gave $125,000 each to the Michigan-based American Justice Partnership (AJP) and the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, which shares AJP's goal of putting more conservatives on the bench.</div><div>
</div><div>That year, AJP gave more than $1 million to the Michigan Republican Party. And the Michigan Chamber gave $5.4 million to the Republican Governors Association -- about the same amount that the RGA subsequently routed to the Michigan GOP. The state GOP spent about $4.8 million on in Michigan's supreme court race that year, according to the independent Michigan Campaign Finance Network, which did a detailed review of public records.</div><div>
</div><div>Got that? Not if the groups involved can help it. The upshot, though, is that two of Wellspring's recipients invested in the contest -- which ultimately restored a conservative majority to the highest court in the state.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In addition, over the course of three years, Wellspring has given nearly $1 million to Missourians for Better Courts. That group has fought to change Missouri's judicial selection process, which it argues is overly influenced by liberal trial lawyers.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Putting, or keeping, conservatives on the nation’s courts was the focus of several other Wellspring grantees, including the Alabama Civil Justice Reform Committee, Alabama Voters Against Lawsuit Abuse, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce and the Illinois Manufacturers Association.</div><div>
</div><div>Cash in, cash out</div><div>
</div><div>On the other side of the ledger sheet, though, the sources of Wellspring's millions are mostly a cipher. Like all 501(c)(4) organizations, it doesn't have to reveal them. CRP and NPR have been able to learn of only three donors, all of which are also (c)(4)s: The American Democracy Alliance gave Wellspring $150,000 in 2008, the year the Corkery group launched. A second, Founding Principles PAC gave it $1,026, also in 2008. And Rosebush Corp. gave Wellspring $100,000 in 2011.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>That's a little more than $251,000 -- roughly 1 percent of the $24 million Wellspring has reported as income from 2008 through 2011. None of the three donor groups returned calls from NPR and CRP seeking comment.</div><div>
</div><div>The American Democracy Alliance, like Wellspring, has taken an interest in judicial elections: In 2010, it gave $100,000 to ShowMe Better Courts, a Missouri group; and $500,000 to the Adam Smith Foundation -- which, in turn sent money to Missourians for Better Courts, the same group that received nearly $1 million from Wellspring.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Rosebush Corp., headed by a Pennsylvanian named Brian Sullivan, also gave $750,000 in 2011 to Americans for Limited Government, a group headed by wealthy libertarian Howard Rich that has spent millions running ads against Democrats and giving to other conservative organizations. The next year, Rosebush gave to Club for Growth Action, which has helped fuel the rise of some tea party Republicans, and to the pro-Mitt Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future.</div><div>...http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/wellsprings-flow.html</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>funded the Davis hit:&nbsp; Though the ATA resisted Gray Davis' lawsuit to avoid disclosing its funders in 2001, the group revealed its major 2002 contributors' names (most likely mistakenly) in the 2002 tax form it provided Public Citizen. Its top contributor that year was the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which gave $2.6 million. The ATA received about $2.3 million of that donation in the month before Election Day.11 The Chamber reportedly employed a strategy of funding outside groups to influence judicial elections in 2002, making its role more discrete than in 2000 when it broadcast ads under its own name.12</div><div>
</div><div>American Taxpayers Alliance 990 form, 2002.</div><div>Robert Lenzner and Matthew Miller, "Buying Justice; For Years Trial Lawyers Owned State Courts. Now Big Business Is Striking Back," Forbes, July 21, 2003.</div><div></div><div>
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</div><div>legal.txt&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>MACRO:&nbsp; big green shifted from grassroots to the courts EDF etc and won major victories&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>stuffed spotted owl story?) AND what's the point of having a Clean Air Act if it's not enforced?&nbsp; Similarly, historic anti-tobacco suit forced companies to admit they kill ppl, forced them to pay damages, and forced them to turn over the proof (those databases are still useful in outing BS ppl and tactics.&nbsp; Do we need same for fossil fuels?</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In addition, CRM used the courts to get social and economic justice (Brown v Bd of Ed) thus Powell says we need FedSoc to balance ACLU (plus corps have massive legal capability to defend and attack eg SLAPP; however, legal firm branches out into lobbying, also buffer (Hunt & Wms hires the intel co to spy on activists).</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Note also that tort and class action lawsuits are leverage where small groups and individuals can get justice from large rich corp</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;---</div><div>
</div><div>omg: "By using stealth tactics to pursue a corporate agenda, the Bush administration is undermining the very landscape of democracy. The White House has also been darkly brilliant at using the courts to do its dirty work -- through methods such as "sweetheart suits," the practice of encouraging states and private groups to file lawsuits against the federal government, and then agreeing to negotiated settlements that bypass environmental laws without any interference from Congress or the public. [10]</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>
</div><div>RICO countered by voodoo TP:&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Citizens for a Sound Economy</div><div>CSE, one of the third-party ‘anti-tax’ tobacco industry partners, was a think tank dedicated to free market economics. CSE (which split into AFP and FreedomWorks in 2004) was co-founded in 1984 by David Koch, of Koch Industries, and Richard Fink, former professor of economics at George Mason University, who has worked for Koch Industries since 1990.3 ,51 CSE supported the agendas of the tobacco and other industries, including oil, chemical, pharmaceutical and telecommunications, and was funded by them.52 In 2002, before Tea Party politics were widely discussed in the mainstream media, CSE started its US Tea Party (http://www.usteaparty.com) project, the website of which stated ‘our US Tea Party is a national event, hosted continuously online and open to all Americans who feel our taxes are too high and the tax code is too complicated.’53 Between 1991 and 2002 the tobacco companies, mainly Philip Morris, provided CSE with at least US$5.3 million (see online supplementary table S3). Philip Morris gave CSE US$250 000 annually in the early 1990s to start six state chapters.41</div><div>
</div><div>Philip Morris (PM) designated CSE a ‘Category A’ public policy organisation for funding.54 ‘Category A’ organisations were ‘the largest and most important/sustained relationships’ that were assigned a ‘PM senior relationship manager’ to put them at the ‘centre of a network of information-sharing among PM people involved with the organisation’ and ‘[assure] systematic and ongoing relationship activities’.54 In response to an internal 1999 email asking whether CSE was worth its current level of funding, Philip Morris’ vice president of federal government affairs replied: They are adding this level of value. They have provided significant grassroots assistance, in the nature of several thousand calls to the Hill on the lawsuit [likely the federal RICO lawsuit against the major cigarette companies discussed below] direct lobbying on the lawsuit, some media as well as continuing a very useful level of activity on FET [federal excise tax]/prescription drugs [a proposal to expand Medicare and fund prescription drugs with a tobacco tax]. Throughout the August [Congressional] Recess they have been very active on our behalf in the field in key states with key Members.55</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>Vol. 18 No. 7 (July, 2008) pp.632-636</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>THE RISE OF THE CONSERVATIVE LEGAL MOVEMENT: THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE LAW, by Steven M. Teles.&nbsp; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 385pp.&nbsp; Cloth. $35.00/£19.95.&nbsp; ISBN: 9780691122083.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Reviewed by Roy B. Flemming, Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University.&nbsp; Email: roy [at] politics.tamu.edu.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Sure, it was a coincidence but the timing could not have been better.&nbsp; The morning before I sat down to write this review, I received a solicitation letter from the Federalist Society asking me for a donation.&nbsp; The letter signed by Eugene B. Meyer, the organization’s president, pointedly quoted Steven Teles’ comment from his book that the “Federalist Society represents, without a doubt, the most vigorous, durable, and well-ordered organization to emerge from . . . modern conservatism’s political strategy.”&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>When Teles set out to document the stumbles, turning points, and successes of the conservative counter-mobilization against legal liberalism, his “first real breakthrough” came after Meyer let him loose to rummage through the Society’s internal documents. Other entrepreneurs in the conservative legal movement like Henry Manne, William “Chip” Mellor, and Clint Bolick fully cooperated with Teles, answering his questions and providing him with background documents.&nbsp; Equally important, pivotal financial patrons of the movement, like the Olin Foundation, followed suit.&nbsp; Finally, Teles decided to organize his research around the themes of strategy and entrepreneurship which he credits to conversations with Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation. No published study about the conservative legal movement of which I am aware can compete with the information, detail, perspectives, and stories that Teles has packed into his book.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Teles’ major stories pivot around the formation and evolution of the Federalist Society, the emergence and institutionalization of law and economics as part of law school curriculums, the Center for Individual Rights, and the Institute for Justice.&nbsp; Nested within these narratives are vignettes of other players and organizations that illustrate how patrons and entrepreneurs learned from their mistakes and redirected their strategies.&nbsp; Teles quickly alerts his readers that he not concerned with organizations like the American Center for Law and Justice that have been involved in religious or social conservative litigation.&nbsp; Nor is he interested in the thicket of conservative think tanks that sprouted up during the past three decades or in the proliferation of litigating groups with traditional pro-business agendas or interests in tort reform.&nbsp; The price of Teles’ tight focus, however, is easily off-set by the many benefits generated by his in-depth discussions.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The idea for a conservative legal counter-mobilization first surfaced in Lewis Powell’s&nbsp; confidential memorandum to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 shortly before Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court.&nbsp; (Powell’s memo can be found at [633] www.pbs.org/wnet/supremecourt/personality/print/sources_document13.html).&nbsp; Entitled “Attack of [sic] the American Free Enterprise System,” Powell argued America’s economic system was under “broad attack.”&nbsp; The “most disquieting” attacks were not those made by the usual left-wing or socialist suspects but those from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians.”&nbsp; Powell urged the Chamber to confront the criticism especially in universities and colleges (including a “balancing of faculties”) and redirect the public agenda by creating incentives for “independent scholars who believe in the system” to publish more often and more widely.&nbsp; In a very real sense, Powell’s ideas foreshadowed Manne’s campaign to create law and economics centers in law schools and the Olin Foundation’s initiatives aimed at the elite schools as well as the network of conservative faculty and students created by the Federalist Society.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>In a section called a “Neglected Opportunity in the Courts,” Powell cautioned that liberal and far left groups had been “far more astute” in recognizing the “judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change.”&nbsp; This could be a “vast area of opportunity” for the Chamber and the soon-to-be associate justice recommended that it hire “highly competent” staff attorneys to file amicus briefs in the Supreme Court or under special circumstances retain “lawyers of national standing and reputation” to participate in Chamber-sponsored law suits.&nbsp; The American Civil Liberties Union, civil rights groups, and liberal public interest law outfits like those created by Ralph Nader, offered off-the-shelf templates that conservatives could use to organize their counter-mobilization.&nbsp; As Teles explains, Powell implied that the fundamental problem was an imbalance in the interests appearing in courtrooms and that it could be righted by recruiting pro-business if not conservative “repeat players” and by a revival of “judicial restraint” on the bench.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Things did not play out as simply as Powell intimated.&nbsp; Following the formation of the Pacific Legal Foundation in 1973 with the support from the California Chamber of Commerce, several other regional foundations were soon created under the auspices of the National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI).&nbsp; This network was organized geographically, not functionally, and held together by interlocking directorships.&nbsp; The result was “organizational turmoil” because as one insider told Teles “NLCPI had all the structural flaws of the Articles of Confederation” (p.63).&nbsp; Equally telling, the emphasis on filing amicus briefs displaced coherent litigation strategies and put the foundations on fund-raising treadmills.&nbsp; Most damning of all for Powell’s business-led strategy were unexpected tensions between business interests and conservative ideology.&nbsp; As Adam Smith cautioned long ago, business interests are not synonymous with the public interest however it is defined.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Teles’ cameo study of the Mountain States Legal Foundation illustrates the point.&nbsp; With reliable funding from Joseph Coors, a long-time patron of right-wing causes, effective leadership in the early years by James Watts who later became President Reagan’s Interior [634] Secretary, and a shared sense of grievance arising from the “Sagebrush Rebellion” in the Western states over the control of federal lands, the Mountain States Legal Foundation had several built-in advantages.&nbsp; Nevertheless it faltered because its business allies expected returns on their “investments” and the foundation often filed amicus briefs in response to particular contributions or to encourage new ones.&nbsp; Matters came to a head when the foundation challenged on First Amendment grounds Denver’s grant of an exclusive cable television franchise to a local businessman, a grant widely supported by the Mile High City’s business community.&nbsp; As an insider explained to Teles, the foundation’s suit “gored very powerful interests there, well connected to the Republican Party . . . Joe Coors resigned from our board [saying] . . . ’I founded MSLF . . . to take on the Sierra Club, not to do this sort of thing’” (p.65).</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Soul-searching about the strategy behind the first generation of public interest firms began in the late 1970s when Michael Horowitz (subsequently chief counsel of the Office of Management and Budget during the first Reagan administration) submitted a highly critical report to the Scaife Foundation.&nbsp; The Horowitz Report redefined the goals of the legal counter-mobilization.&nbsp; Litigation alone could not dislodge legal liberalism.&nbsp; Ties to business interests tethered conservative public interest firms and held them back from taking the moral high ground. Amicus briefs were “pufferies intended for naïve audiences of donors and not truly doing meaningful work” (p.71).&nbsp; The aversion to basing organizations in Washington, D.C. had to be jettisoned in order to confront liberalism on its own turf.&nbsp; Most important of all, the movement needed to redefine itself along clear, consistent libertarian lines with long-term strategies that would appeal to underdogs caught up in unresponsive legal institutions like black beauticians struggling under state regulations or lower middle class whites whose houses were threatened by eminent domain.&nbsp; Conservatives had to become idealistic “good guys” limiting government and empowering civil society.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The Horowitz Report doused cold water on patron enthusiasm for funding conservative public interest law firms but in time the foundations used the report to restructure how these firms operated&nbsp; Two of these second generation firms are the subject of a separate chapter in which Teles compares the Center for Individual Rights (CIR), best known for its battles against affirmative action policies at the University of Texas and University of Michigan, and the Institute for Justice (IJ) whose fame soared after it turned defeat in KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON into a public policy success.&nbsp; While the two firms differ significantly in many ways, they share important similarities.&nbsp; For one thing, judicial activism no longer is a dirty word.&nbsp; Instead both firms see judicial activism as a means of reviving old rights to protect the conservative goal of limited government; property rights and eminent domain offer just one example.&nbsp; Clint Bolick (2007), co-founder of the Institute for Justice, recently argued in favor of judicial activism in a new book published by the libertarian Cato Institute.&nbsp; The firms, seeing the value in an activist bench, are accordingly more strategic in the cases they select and [635] keep a steady eye on whether a case has the potential to change the public policy agenda or the law.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Horowitz, like Powell, stressed that a “key site” to contest legal liberalism was the university.&nbsp; In three chapters, Teles traces the winding, upward path of the law and economics movement and the seemingly inexorable growth of the Federalist Society.&nbsp; The law and economics story has two parts.&nbsp; The first deals with constructing the “mother ship” at the University of Chicago and the travails of Henry Manne to build law and economic centers at other universities and his final success at George Mason University.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Chicago legitimized law and economics.&nbsp; The JOURNAL OF LAW AND ECONOMICS, the sub-field’s first journal, started there and was later edited by Ronald Coase who won a Nobel Prize for his work.&nbsp; Chicago’s highly influential Anti-Trust Project provided fellowships supported by the Volker Fund, attracted law professors like Robert Bork, and revolutionized the field.&nbsp; Richard Posner with impeccable establishment credentials (Harvard Law and former Supreme Court clerk for Justice William Brennan) wrote ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF LAW (published in 1973 and now in its seventh edition) in which he challenged myriad shibboleths in traditional legal research.&nbsp; In the meantime, Manne spread the gospel by pushing for new centers at other universities, aggressively marketed law and economics with help from the Liberty Fund by holding regular conferences that identified ambitious scholars and brought them into the conservative fold, and through the Economics Institute for Federal Judges introduced numerous judges to the fundamentals of micro-economics.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The second part of the story focuses on the Olin Foundation’s strategic deployment of its largesse aimed directly at faculty and students in elite law schools (most of Manne’s centers were at lesser-ranked schools) which solidified the stature of the law and economics sub-field and raised its status as a distinctive alternative to traditional and contemporary legal scholarship.&nbsp; Law and economics was not Olin’s first choice, however.&nbsp; As an official explained to Teles: “I would have preferred to do something in constitutional law but . . . [i]f you said to a dean that you wanted to fund conservative constitutional law, he would reject the idea out of hand . . . Law and economics is neutral, but it has a philosophical thrust in the direction of free markets and limited government.&nbsp; That is, like many disciplines, it seems neutral but it isn’t in fact” (p.189).&nbsp; Olin’s gamble on law and economics paid off handsomely in ways that Lewis Powell would have applauded.&nbsp; At Harvard, Olin’s support for law and economics provided money, academic panache, and camouflage for Harvard’s president who wanted to stymie the critical legal studies movement and mollify angry alumni in corporate law firms upset by the havoc they felt the “crits” were creating within the profession.&nbsp; Law and economics raised the research bar for hiring and tenure decisions and offered alternatives to law schools that altered the balance of power in their faculties.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The Federalist Society rang repeated alarms within the legal profession that Harvard Law was “out of control” and [636] from its beginning the Society has been concerned generally about the placement of conservatives in law schools and out of them.&nbsp; Teles maintains in his chapter on the Society, however, that over the course of its twenty-five year history the Federalist Society has carved out an influential niche for itself by limiting its attention to creating and fostering complex networks of lawyers, faculty, law students, and foundation patrons that are held together by an emphasis on serious debate and discourse over ideas that challenge legal liberalism while avoiding right-wing factionalism.&nbsp; Eschewing the establishment of an in-house litigation center early on, the Society also decided not turn itself into a conservative clone of the American Bar Association despite earlier feelings that perhaps it should and despite its persistent criticisms of the ABA.&nbsp; These strategic choices (there were others at critical moments) were made by a stable, self-perpetuating cadre of long-serving leaders, including Eugene Meyer, who were present at the Society’s founding and are aligned with foundation executives and senior figures from the legal community.&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Teles neither constructs a theory of the rise of the conservative legal movement nor tests one.&nbsp; Conceptual references are employed at various times but largely to locate the study within the existing literature.&nbsp; This by no means diminishes Teles’ accomplishment.&nbsp; Each of his multiple interlocking stories of the pas de trois between different conservative entrepreneurs, their patrons and financiers, and the institutions they either created or tried to change took place over several years and demanded clear precise detailing, which they duly received.&nbsp; Teles’ book is an important reference and the chief departure point for anybody seriously wanting to understand one of the most important transformations in contemporary legal history and politics.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>REFERENCES:</div><div>
</div><div>Bolick, Clint. 2007. DAVID’S HAMMER: THE CASE FOR AN ACTIVIST JUDICIARY. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Posner, Richard. 1973. ECONOMICS OF LAW.&nbsp; Boston: Little Brown and Company.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>CASE REFERENCE:</div><div>
</div><div>KELO v. CITY OF NEW LONDON, 545 U.S. 469 (2005)</div><div>
</div><div>*</div><div>
</div><div>Roy B. Flemming.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;=</div><div>
</div><div>Can a Judge Really Block the SEC’s Settlement With Steven Cohen?</div><div>Judge Victor Marrero last week became the latest federal judge to question a time-honored tactic of federal regulators: negotiating settlements in which companies pay millions of dollars in penalties without admitting or denying that they've actually done anything wrong.</div><div>
</div><div>In the case before Marrero, SAC Capital Advisors, a hedge fund run by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, had agreed to settle insider-trading allegations by writing the Securities and Exchange Commission a check for $602 million. As usual, the deal included the "neither admit nor deny" language that has become standard for settlements with the SEC and other federal regulators.</div><div>
</div><div>Marrero found that odd. "There is something counterintuitive and incongruous about settling for $600 million if it truly did nothing wrong," he said at a Federal District Court hearing last week in Manhattan.</div><div>
</div><div>Judges have been increasingly willing to question the "neither admit nor deny" deals since Judge Jed S. Rakoff refused to approve a $285 million settlement in 2011 between the SEC and Citigroup over allegations of mortgage fraud.</div><div>
</div><div>In December 2011, Judge Rudolph T. Randa, a federal judge in Wisconsin, questioned an SEC settlement with the Koss Corporation, the Milwaukee-based headphone manufacturer, in which the company didn't admit or deny wrongdoing (though he ultimately approved the settlement.) Two months later, Judge Renee Marie Bumb blocked an $11.5 million settlement between the Federal Trade Commission and a New Jersey marketing company that also used "neither admit nor deny" language.</div><div>
</div><div>"They've asked more questions, they've taken more time," Thomas O. Gorman, a partner at Dorsey & Whitney who specializes in securities law, told ProPublica.</div><div>
</div><div>But it's far from certain whether judges actually have the power to block such settlements.</div><div>
</div><div>http://www.propublica.org/article/can-a-judge-really-block-the-s.e.c.s-settlement-with-steve-cohen</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>Brand name riggers of the justice system</div><div>Cowboy hat By Jim Hightower - Mon., 3/4/13</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>Practically every national brand name you've ever heard of now slips predatory arbitration provisions into their customer terms-of-service agreements and/or employment agreements. Not only do these sneaky inserts strip away your constitutional right to take them to court (peremptorily immunizing them from any wrongs they do to you), but many of the boilerplate provisions also arbitrarily ban you from joining with other small claimants in class actions to hold them accountable. Here is a sampling of 10 market powerhouses that suckerpunch you with this double-whammy:</div><div>
</div><div>Amazon</div><div>Dell</div><div>Starbucks</div><div>Verizon Wireless</div><div>AT&T</div><div>eBay</div><div>Time Warner</div><div>Wells Fargo</div><div>Citibank</div><div>Microsoft</div><div>The list of corporations that underhandedly bar your access to the courts ranges across every business sector. Buying a home? If you choose one from Centex, DR Horton ("America's Builder"), KB, Pulte, or Ryland-it'll come with forced arbitration built into it. Maybe you or a loved one needs a nursing home. That can be an unhappy experience, but if you have a complaint, you'll find that such national chains as Carrington Place, Covenant, and Kindred shove you into the dark hallways of corporate justice.</div><div>
</div><div>Take out a student loan from Discover, invest through Charles Schwab or T. Rowe Price, purchase a television from Sony, or a game console from Xbox LIVE, get involved in some e-commerce on eBay or PayPal, get a Starbucks gift card, buy a membership at Gold's Gym, go for entertainment through Ticketmaster or Netflix, or call Orkin for pest control--every one of those transactions comes with a fine-print proviso that waives your Seventh Amendment rights.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>The same goes for the contract you'll have to sign if you take a job with nearly any national corporation. From Hooters to Neiman Marcus, Papa John's to Yahoo!, Hobby Lobby to Nordstrom, Manpower to Macy's, the employment agreement that they tell you is just a perfunctory part of putting you on the payroll has the binding arbitration "gotcha" in it.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;---</div><div>
</div><div>Yet another thrust of the corporate political agenda was the fostering</div><div>of a sympathetic climate for corporate anti-regulatory ideology</div><div>among the federal judiciary. To this end, several pro-corporate foundations</div><div>developed ??judicial education” seminars, which involved free trips</div><div>for federal judges to attend training sessions at resorts such as Marco</div><div>Island, Florida. Here corporate perspectives on environmental regulations,</div><div>anti-trust law, and other topics were presented along with golf,</div><div>fishing, and other recreations.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;The organization that pioneered the judge</div><div>junkets, the Law and Economics Center, was founded in 1974 and</div><div>funded by a number of corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Abbott</div><div>Laboratories, and Proctor and Gamble, as well as right-wing foun.. 173</div><div>dations such as the Carthage Foundation and the Olin Foundation.</div><div>LEC’s program included such seminars as “Misconceptions About Environmental</div><div>Pollution and Cancer.”</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;Later, additional conservative</div><div>groups joined the judicial education movement, including the Foundation</div><div>for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) and the</div><div>Liberty Fund. Topics at a typical seminar sponsored by FREE at the</div><div>Elkhorn Ranch in Big Sky, Montana, included “The Environment.a</div><div>CEO’s Perspective,” taught by retired Texaco CEO Alfred DeCrane,</div><div>“Progressive Myths and the Lords of Yesteryear,” and “Why We Should</div><div>Run Public Lands Like Businesses.”</div><div>
</div><div>According to LEC’s newsletter, many judges reported that the</div><div>seminars had “totally altered their frame of reference for cases involving</div><div>economic issues.” One such judge was Spencer Williams, who attended</div><div>a Law and Economics seminar at the Key Biscayne Hotel in Miami</div><div>while presiding over a predatory pricing case being heard in U.S. district</div><div>court. Returning from the seminar, the judge overturned a jury’s</div><div>decision that would have awarded $15 million to the plaintiff. In a letter</div><div>to the LEC, Williams wrote, “As a result of my better understanding of</div><div>the concept of marginal costs, I have recently set aside a $15 million</div><div>anti-trust verdict.” gangs of am</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>----</div><div>
</div><div>Rove stacked ct in TX Priscilla Owen: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/o/priscilla_r_owen/index.html</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>She chose opinions overturning rulings in favor of a child born with birth defects, a worker injured on an oil rig, a nurse fired for blowing the whistle on a drug-dealing co-worker, a family with an interest in an oil field that had been drained by a nearby company, asbestos and breast-implant plaintiffs and a student whose school made him cut his hair....Ms. Owen represented mostly oil and gas companies. She quickly gained a reputation as a formidable litigator, and the Texas firm of Andrews & Kurth made her a partner by the time she was 30.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>sentelle ~ ESA b/c stops us from building hosp?! or from driving to them if bug on windshield was ES 192</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>fed judge ~ earth day in school b/c religion 192&nbsp; strat ignor</div><div>
</div><div>---</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>see http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/magazine/17CONSTITUTION.html?pagewanted=print&position</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>big picture hist</div><div>
</div><div>-----</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>NEWS: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/issue/</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div>
</div><div>...</div><div>
</div><div>Another way the wealthiest Americans have rigged the rules so more of the national income flows upward may be just as consequential, but less well understood. A 30-year campaign to push America's courts sharply to the right has borne abundant fruit for those in the top 1 percent.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>We see it reflected in today's Supreme Court, which, having unleashed a flood of super-PAC cash into our political campaigns in a decision that was one of the most brazen examples of judicial activism in the court's history, now stands poised to overturn not only the Democrats' healthcare bill, but much of the jurisprudence that supported the welfare state developed since the New Deal.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>A study by the Constitutional Accountability Center found that the Chamber of Commerce had won 65 percent of its cases heard by the court under Chief Justice John Roberts, compared to 56 percent under former Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1986-2005) and just 43 percent of the cases that came during the Burger court (1969-1986).</div><div>
</div><div>??</div><div>
</div><div>But that's only the beginning. “The Roberts Court,” wrote Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, is “slowly but surely... giving corporate America a handbook on how to engage in misconduct. In case after case, it seems big companies are being given the playbook on how to win even bigger the next time.”</div><div>
</div><div>Many of the court's rulings have overturned long-standing precedents. While conservatives constantly rail against judges "legislating from the bench," it is far more common for right-leaning jurists to engage in “judicial activism” than those of a liberal bent. That's what several studies have concluded. Media Matters offered a run-down of a couple of prominent ones:</div><div>
</div><div>A 2005 study by Yale University law professor Paul Gewirtz and Yale Law School graduate Chad Golder showed that among Supreme Court justices at that time, those most frequently labeled "conservative" were among the most frequent practitioners of at least one brand of judicial activism -- the tendency to strike down statutes passed by Congress. Those most frequently labeled "liberal" were the least likely to strike down statutes passed by Congress.</div><div>
</div><div>A 2007 study published by University of Chicago law professor Thomas J. Miles and Cass R. Sunstein... used a different measurement of judicial activism: the tendency of judges to strike down decisions by federal regulatory agencies. Sunstein and Miles found that by this definition, the Supreme Court's "conservative" justices were the most likely to engage in "judicial activism" while the "liberal" justices were most likely to exercise "judicial restraint."</div><div>
</div><div>In a recent opinion, two federal appeals court judges suggested that all efforts to protect workers, consumers or the environment were unconstitutional, including regulatory efforts by the states. It's a radical view, but one that has gotten increasing traction in conservative legal circles. It is also the culmination of years of institutional investments by the corporate Right to advance what's come to be known as the “law and economics??? movement, which analyzes legal rulings “costs” – essentially applying neoliberal economic logic to the field. Its advocates eschew the notion that human rights or economic fairness are inherently valuable factors for the law to consider.</div><div>
</div><div>The model has gained increasing influence in American courts, and that's no accident. In his book, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law, Johns Hopkins scholar Steven Teles writes that conservatives, reacting to what they viewed as liberal hegemony in the legal community of the 1960s, fought hard to shift the legal terrain rightward.</div><div>
</div><div>Spurred by their overlapping grievances, informed by an increasingly sophisticated of how to produce legal change, and coordinated by strategically shrewd group of patrons, conservatives began investing in a broad range activities designed to reverse their ?? organizational weaknesses. While similar kinds of organizational development were happening in other domains … in no other area was the process of strategic investment as prolonged, ambitious, complicated and successful as in the law.</div><div>In 1998, the Washington Post reported that “Federal judges are attending expenses-paid, five-day seminars on property rights and the environment at resorts in Montana, sessions underwritten by conservative foundations that are also funding a wave of litigation on those issues in the federal courts.”</div><div>Funding for the seminars, run by a group called the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), also comes from foundations run by companies with a significant interest in property rights and environmental law issues.</div><div>One of the group's funders was the John M. Olin Foundation, which invested millions of dollars in the law and economic movement – endowing university chairs, funding think-tanks and providing early support for the Federalist Society, which was founded in 1982 by former attorney general Ed Meese, controversial Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and Ted Olsen—who years later would win the infamous Bush v. Gore case before the Supreme Court in 2000 and then go on to serve as Bush’s solicitor general. The foundation said in a 2003 report to its trustees, “All in all, the Federalist Society has been one of the best investments the foundation ever made.”</div><div>
</div><div>In 2005, the Olin Foundation actually declared “mission accomplished” and closed up shop. The New York Times reported that after “three decades financing the intellectual rise of the right,” the foundation’s services were no longer needed. The Times added that the loss of Olin wasn’t terribly troubling for the movement, because whereas “a generation ago just three or four major foundations operated on the Right, today’s conservatism has no shortage of institutions, donors or brio.”</div><div>
</div><div>If the economics and law movement were to become the standard in our legal culture, it would represent a massive upward redistribution of wealth. Not only would “transfer payments” – unemployment benefits, assistance for needy families and the like – be deemed unconstitutional, but so would minimum wages, job training programs, subsidized student loans and most of our already threadbare social safety net. And that environment will have been purchased for a princely sum by those who have profited so handsomely from America's spiraling income inequality.</div><div>
</div><div>Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>http://movetoamend.org/how-corporate-elite-hijacked-americas-courts-enrich-top-1-percent</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>http://old.mediatransparency.org/storyprinterfriendly.php?storyID=21</div><div>
</div><div>In her recent book Slanting the Story, journalist-critic Trudy Lieberman cites the Powell manifesto's call for a focal attack on Ralph Nader. She suggests that as a result of such concerted assaults, the right wing is "well on its way" to victory in the "broad philosophical argument" between liberals and conservatives.</div><div>
</div><div>In its 1993 paper Justice for Sale, the Alliance for Justice detailed how Powell's legal recommendations inspired "a multi-faceted, comprehensive, and integrated campaign" coordinated and funded by large corporations and rightwing foundations "to create taxpayer subsidized law firms...to rewrite American jurisprudence...advanc[e] their agenda before judges, lawyers, legal scholars, and government policy makers...[and] sought to assure control over the future direction of the law" by installing ideologically friendly faculty in law schools, as well as organizing and rewarding students with scholarships and clerkships under conservative judges, and placing those judges on the bench.</div><div>
</div><div>The Alliance document reported that the California Chamber of Commerce picked up on Powell and proposed what became in 1973 the Pacific Legal Foundation, the first of eight regional litigation centers. The seed money for establishing these centers was provided that year by J. Simon Fluor, founder of the global engineering company that bears his name. The Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Smith Richardson, and Coors' Castle Rock foundations, and others, continue to underwrite these operations. They have wrought great changes in the law - such as weakening affirmative action, and curbing access to courtrooms by death-row prisoners, the handicapped, minorities, and the elderly - to appeal, to sue, to vote. Cases argued up the judicial ladder by radical litigators have often reached the Supreme Court. They tried unsuccessfully to roll back the Miranda rights of prisoners placed under arrest, and to limit the right of states to enforce certain environmental protections. But they have won decisions in Federal courtrooms that endanger public school systems, the rights of women, the separation of church and state, and clean air and water regulations.</div><div>
</div><div>The Federalist Society is the legal think tank for these conservative litigators. It has promulgated theories that have been applied by litigators to weaken the powers of the federal government, reverse legal precedents encoded by the Warren court, and to propound counter-Constitutional principles on states' rights and property rights whose roots can be traced back to the Confederacy. The Federalists are particularly effective on campus, with active student chapters in most American law schools.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.mindfully.org/Air/2004/Judge-Ginsburg-Industry23mar04.htm</div><div>
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</div><div>sentelle, kirkland & Ellis, Baden, douglas ginsberg FREE</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div></div><div>
</div><div>PR BS left list eh LWV,&nbsp; http://www.americanjusticepartnership.org/pdf/Justice_Hijacked_Report.pdf&nbsp; apparently upset by merit vs voter selction of judges. Soros funded? Justice at Stake</div><div>
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</div><div>Justice at Stake is a nonpartisan campaign with more than 50 national partners, working to keep state and federal courts fair and impartial. Justice at Stake Campaign partners educate the public and work for reforms to keep politics and special interests out of the courtroom—and to protect what Chief Justice Rehnquist called one of the "crown jewels" of our democracy.</div><div>
</div><div>JAS is currently funded by grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Joyce Foundation, the Herbert Block Foundation, the Moriah Fund and the Open Society Institute.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.justiceatstake.org/about/index.cfm</div><div>
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</div><div>koch http://www.communityrights.org/TaintedJustice/KochReport.pdf</div><div>
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</div><div>5 mil one year to fed soc</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>59 mil over 18 year to university judicial education?&nbsp; law and econoics ctr at gmu, loec kansas univ modelled on gmu and FREE since 1987&nbsp; Douglas Ginsberg</div><div>
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</div><div>These organizations influence not only public opinion and policy but also judicial outlook. For example, in 1999 CSE subsidized the creation of amici briefs providing reasons to proclaim the Clear Air Act unconstitutional. CSE received $600,000 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation that year.175 The foundation also provided substantial funding to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), which holds seminars for federal judges at its ranch near Big Sky, Montana. Many influential judges attend these seminars, including those who heard arguments made by legal representatives receiving funding from CSE. It makes sense that the Kochs would fund such anti-environment organizations, given their seedy past of environmental violations and lawsuits. Most significantly, the U.S. Department of Justice charged Koch Industries with 97 counts of defying federal hazardous waste and clean air-acts when it knowingly emitted benzene fumes and then lied about its actions when questioned. In 2001, Koch Industries agreed to a $20 million settlement, a drastically smaller sum than it would have paid if convicted.176</div><div>
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</div><div>Other significant grantees in the domain of research and advocacy include the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. David Koch serves on the board of directors of the Reason Foundation.</div><div>
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</div><div>The foundations also provide substantial funding to the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRI), whose mission is "to champion freedom, opportunity and personal responsibility for all individuals by advancing free-market policy solutions."177 The organization espouses entrepreneurship, privatization and individual liberty, three of the Koch brothers' main areas of interest. PRI publishes articles and papers, sponsors events, testifies before policymakers and provides commentary for a variety of media sources, reaching more than 141 million people in 2001 through these means. The organization supports transferring power from the government to private organizations and individuals, especially in terms of education, the environment and health care. It believes that government taxes and regulations "stifle" the nation's "entrepreneurial spirit" and lead to problems in each of these domains. Thus, the organization promotes vouchers, increased standards and accountability, and "teacher quality" in education; free-market competition in health care; and the elimination of federal social welfare programs, claiming that they result in reliance on the state and undue control of the government over individual lives. The organization gives an annual privatization award to individuals and private organizations that provide important community services, such as charter schools and sources of private scholarships.</div><div>
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</div><div>In addition to funding think tanks and advocacy institutes, the Koch foundations also provide substantial sums to academic institutes and universities to further conservative ideology and recruit youth to the crusade. Their main grantee is George Mason University (GMU). The three Koch foundations contributed $23,030,497 between 1985 and 2002 to the university, its foundation and its Institute for Human Studies.178 Richard Fink, the president of the Charles G. Koch Foundation, serves on the Board of Directors of GMU, where he taught until 1984. After serving as president and chief executive officer of CSE for several years, he returned to GMU, where he serves on the board of trustees of the Center for the Study of Public Choice and the Center for Market Processes and as a member of the board of the Progressive Policy Institute.179</div><div>
</div><div>Charles is chairman of GMU's Institute for Humane Studies, which hosts the Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program. The mission of the center is "to support the achievement of a free society by discovering and facilitating the development of talented, productive students, scholars and other intellectuals who share a commitment to liberty and who demonstrate the potential to change significantly the current climate of opinion to one more congenial to the principles and practices of freedom."180 The institute sponsors free summer seminars for students interested in learning about "free market economics and networking."</div><div>
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</div><div>The two most significant contributions to the university came in the form of a $3 million grant in 1997, which helped to launch the Mercatus Center, and a $10 million grant in 1998, which helped to create the James M.Buchanan Center for the Study of Political Economy.</div><div>
</div><div>Charles Koch is a board member at the Mercatus Center, which describes itself as a "research and education center [that] generates knowledge and understanding of how institutions affect the freedom to prosper and holds organizations accountable for their impact on that freedom."181 The center promotes free markets and "Western" values and customs. The director of its regulatory studies program, Wendy Lee Gramm, was named "villain of the month" by the Clean Air Trust in January 2002 for her work in opposition to federal regulations aimed at protecting health and the environment. The nonprofit trust charges that through his considerable donations, "Koch basically rents the university's name to give a patina of credibility to Wendy Gramm's anti-environmental agenda."182</div><div>
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</div><div>The James M. Buchanan Center for the Study of Political Economy encompasses the Center for Study of Public Choice and the Center for Market Processes and is associated with the Institute for Humane Studies. Of the Buchanan Center's grant, the president of GMU remarked, "We believe this support will help us become a national center of excellence of study of the relationship between the polity and the economy."183 Another $3 million grant in 2001 from the Charles G. Koch Foundation allowed the university to establish the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science (ICES) with its seven prestigious professors of experimental economics at GMU.184</div><div>
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</div><div>GMU also directed some of the Koch foundation funding to its Law and Economics Center (LEC) at its School of Law. Flipside.org reports that the LEC's mission is to "teach federal judges that the goal of the law should be to maximize the wealth of society by promoting the efficient use of scarce resources." To do so, the center sponsors annual eight-week training conferences at resort locations for federal and state judges. Nearly 800 judges, including two U.S. Supreme Court justices, have participated in the program since it began in 1976. The LEC also holds "economic institutes for law professors and law institutes for economists" (e.g., the Economics of Private Law institute), so that the two disciplines may become more intertwined.185</div><div>
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</div><div>In addition to its donations to the LEC and FREE, the Koch family foundations also provide significant contributions to other conservative legal organizations. Clint Bolick, a rigid opponent of affirmative action at the Landmark Center for Civil Rights, and William Mellor, former president of PRI, asked the Koch family for financial backing for a libertarian public-interest law firm to advocate for school vouchers, faith-based social service programs and property rights and to oppose affirmative action. The organization became the conservative Institute for Justice in 1991, and it continues to receive substantial funding from the Koch family foundations.186 The Federalist Society also receives a great deal of funding from the Koch family.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://old.mediatransparency.org/funderprofile.php?funderID=9</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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</div><div>T Hartmann SLAPP lawsuits</div><div>
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</div><div>Politicians, staffers, and flacks often have legal background (perhaps prepares to argue and write laws).&nbsp; The mainstream green movement developed considerable legal and policy expertise in order to use the Clean Air etc acts to force corporations (and sometimes the government itself) to protect the environment and public health.</div><div>
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</div><div>Gov't can also use law as weapon: Nixon enemy list investigated by FBI and IRS.&nbsp; Corps can use deep pockets to force adversaries to surrender, even when in the right (e.g., Monsanto on farmers and seed cleaner).&nbsp; Corps can also use lawyers to deflect or delay gov't enforcement, which ends up being the same thing.&nbsp; The tobacco industry routinely staved off lawsuits and regulations for decades.</div><div>
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</div><div>More ominously, the ascendancy of a right-wing Supreme Court has been a tremendous help.&nbsp; The Citizens United case allows unlimited and untraceable money into the political process, including the election of judges themselves (e.g., coal company state Sup Ct justice).&nbsp; A conservative supreme court refused to allow a complete vote count in Florida (assisted by brooks Bros Riot, supported by Abramoff, Enron, Rove, Exxon?</div><div>
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</div><div>Law should the MOST moderating influence: judges are often appointed for life, and they are bound by precedent, and constantly subject to review.&nbsp; Also presumably old and respected in their community.&nbsp; Conservatives are wary of "acticist " jusges who seek to supplant the legislature in making laws. (do "strict constructivsts" anticipate tea party consitutionalists?]</div><div>
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</div><div>--</div><div>
</div><div>American Legal Foundation (Founded by Daniel Popeo (of WLF) and run by Michael Carvin) - It says: "we deal exclusively with media issues."</div><div>Atlantic Legal Foundation (PM supported) Run by James Richards with strong links to Stephen Whelan (husband of Elizabeth Whelan) and the ACSH - claims to be "committed to redressing the bias against business which manifests itself in favor of narrow "consumer" or "environmental" concerns."</div><div>National Legal Center in the Public Interest - Ernest Heuter (It does no litigation work, but is PM supported) It was founded by PLF, and has no members-only a board of directors. It acts as an umbrella and communications hub.</div><div>Pacific Legal Center (Sacramento) - Ron Zumbrun - This is the nation's oldest and largest with a 1983 staff of 20 (PM supported)</div><div>Southern States Legal Center (New Orleans) founded in 1983 by Elizabeth Williams.</div><div>Mountain States Legal Center (founded by the PLF)</div><div>Great Plains Legal Foundation (founded by the PLF), and now called Landmark (Kansas City)</div><div>Landmark Legal Foundation Run by Mark Levin. Scaife used this organization to fund the anti-Clinton Arkansas Project (He gave them $250,000 - and more than $1 million over a few years).</div><div>National Chamber Litigation Center Inc. (Washington) - affiliated with US Chamber of Commerce - run by Stephen Bokat - and says it is "unabashedly pro-business." (PM worked with them and the Business RoundTable)</div><div>Capital Legal Foundation (Washington) - run by Dan Burt and funded by Scaife</div><div>Washington Legal Foundation - founded by Daniel Popeo (independent of the PLF but supported by both PM and its subsidiary, Kraft Foods)</div><div>----</div><div>
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</div><div>Mayer NYer</div><div>
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</div><div>The Kochs���?¢�������?� subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, ���¢�?�������respectable elements of society���¢����������¢��������intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.</div><div>
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</div><div>Corporate think-tank influence extends even into the branch of government designed to be immune to it: the judiciary. Some of that influence is exerted by intervention in lawsuits to make arguments that favor industry. In 1999, for example, the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation, the funding arm of CSE, paid for "friend of the court" briefs that sought to declare the Clean Air Act unconstitutional. Where might a nonprofit charity like CSEF come up on short notice with the money required to pay lawyers who can charge $5,000 an hour? Answer: the Claude Lambe Foundation, also controlled by the Kochs, which gave CSEF $600,000 for "general operating support"; the DaimlerChrysler Corporation Fund, which kicked in another $250,000; and General Electric, which matched the DaimlerChrysler Fund���¢��������s donation. There���¢��?������s no way of knowing whether that $1.1 million paid for the legal briefs, but that amount buys a lot of lawyers, even at Washington prices.</div><div>
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</div><div>Influence is also exercised less directly. For example, the same Lambe Foundation that gave to CSEF also donated $150,000 to the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), based in Bozeman, Montana. FREE conducts seminars for federal judges���¢��������including those at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where CSEF���¢��������s briefs were filed. FREE is in ideological lockstep with organizations like CSEF: While the foundation works the legal angle, FREE "educates" the judges who will hear the cases. Indeed, the two judges, Douglas Ginsburg and Stephen Williams, who held the Clean Air Act unconstitutional (a ruling that was later overturned by the Supreme Court), based their decision largely on the arguments advanced by CSEF. And both judges had enjoyed the all-expenses-paid FREE seminars. (Ginsburg attended them each year from 1993 to ���¢��������98; Williams went in 1993 and 1998.)</div><div>
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</div><div>The Montana seminars feature horseback riding and hiking at FREE���¢��������s dude ranch near Big Sky. In each of two years, 1999 and 2000, 6 percent of the federal judiciary took in these junkets. A typical day includes morning presentations, free time in the afternoon, an evening cocktail hour, and then dinner with a speech by, say, Alfred DeCrane Jr., retired head of Texaco, called "The Environment���?¢�������?�A CEO���¢��������s Perspective."</div><div>
</div><div>??</div><div>
</div><div>FREE says its seminars focus on "economic implications of science, risk, and environmental issues." Sounds innocent enough, until you peruse some of the reading material. One seminar handout discusses the "bureaucratic pathologies of . . . agencies like the EPA" and the "irresponsible efforts [of] . . . environmentalists hostile toward industrial civilization." FREE defends its seminars and its reliance on quasi-corporate funding on the grounds that "federal judges are smart, mature, sophisticated men and women . . . disposed by training to be discerning, critical, and alert to shoddy arguments."</div><div>
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</div><div>It appears that FREE seminars have been successful at winning over these discerning judges. According to the Community Rights Counsel, a public-interest law firm based in Washington, D.C., that has gathered and analyzed an immense amount of data on FREE, in one case, "the judge ruled in favor of a litigant that [was] funded by the same special interests that helped fund his seminar." That judge, Stephen Williams (the same one who ruled the Clean Air Act unconstitutional), reversed himself in a highly publicized suit brought by the timber industry to gut the Endangered Species Act. At issue in Sweet Home v. Babbitt was the power of the government to protect endangered species by regulating habitat. In a two-to-one opinion issued on July 23, 1993, Williams and another judge upheld that power. Two weeks later, Williams attended his first FREE seminar. When he returned to Washington, he granted a rehearing to the timber industry, switched his vote, then wrote an opinion (later overturned by the Supreme Court) striking down the habitat regulations.</div><div>
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</div><div>Central to the functioning of American democracy is a judicial system that dispenses justice with an even hand. Yet CSEF, FREE, and other like-minded groups seem intent on reshaping the judiciary in their own image. Chief among these groups is the shadowy but powerful Federalist Society. Another regular recipient of Koch largesse, the Federalist Society is described by the Washington Monthly as "the best-organized, best-funded, and most effective legal network operating in this country." (See "Lay of the Land," March/April 2002.) Lawyers who belong to or are active in the society include at least two Supreme Court justices�?��¢�����?���Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas���¢???�������as well as dozens of other federal judges, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Solicitor General Ted Olson, and Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. The society boasts a total membership of "20,000 legal professionals [and] active chapters in 60 cities." Yet, according to its 1998 federal tax return (which was provided to me when researching this story and which mistakenly included its list of donors), the Federalist Society���¢���???����s income that year included $4,934,325 in grants from the Kochs���¢�������� and other such foundations but zero���¢��������yes, zero�?��¢�����?���in membership dues.</div><div>
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</div><div>http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200207/thinktank_printable.asp</div><div>
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</div><div>Jud Confirm Network</div><div>
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</div><div>r reed</div><div>
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</div><div>http://politicalcorrection.org/factcheck/200905190002</div><div>
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</div><div>stein 2005?</div><div>
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</div><div>���?����· Center for Individual Rights: $2.1 million 37 annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>������?�· Pacific Legal Foundation: $6.5 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>����?���· Institute for Justice: $4.7 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>�������· Landmark Legal Foundation: $1.1 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>�������· Mountain States Legal Foundation: $2.1 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>�������· Washington Legal Foundation: $3.2 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>��?�����· Judicial Watch: $14.3 million annual budget</div><div>
</div><div>���?����· Federalist Society: $3.6 million annual budget</div><div>
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</div><div>=</div><div>
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</div><div>hightower</div><div>
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</div><div>The entire court system is infested</div><div>Cowboy hat By Jim Hightower - Sun., 1/30/11</div><div>Unfortunately, the corporatization of America's judiciary is not just a problem at the top. For more than 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by such ultra-wealthy corporate supremists as the Kochs, Scaifes, DeVoses, Coors, and Murdochs to place extremist, laissez-faire ideologues throughout the federal court structure. Using their extensive, well funded, and coordinated network of front groups, these moneyed elites can now move litigation through corporate-friendly courts at the district, appellate, and supreme levels.</div><div>
</div><div>??</div><div>
</div><div>For example, the legal effort by right-wing operatives to scuttle Obama's health care reform has taken the path of least political resistance, for their lawyers know how to go court shopping. They file their cases in the courts of judges who were put there because they are ideologically opposed to such things as government regulation of insurance giants and health care conglomerates. Some two dozen of these 'Obamacare' cases have been generated in the past few months, pushed by a who's who of corporate-funded fronts, including the American Center for Law and Justice, the Goldwater Institute, Judicial Watch, Liberty University, the Thomas More Law Center, the Pacific Justice Institute&nbsp; http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/groups/pacific-justice-institute , and the Pacific Legal Foundation. Carefully choosing their courts, they've filed multiple cases that go after various parts of the reform law. As an official of the Goldwater group puts it: "[Obama's] health care plan will not die in a single sweep. It will take a thousand cuts."</div><div>
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</div><div>One of these cuts has come from US District Judge Henry Hudson of Richmond, Virginia. On December 13, he ruled that a key provision of Obama's reform is unconstitutional, a ruling at odds with 14 other federal judges who'd dismissed similar challenges. The judge had to resort to tortured reasoning from the Civil War era to push this flawed case forward, but, hey--you can't let legal niceties get in the way of ideology.</div><div>
</div><div>Peek under Hudson's judicial robe, and you'll find a naked partisan with a long career in hard-right Republican politics. A protege of Ronald Reagan and his detestable attorney general, Ed Meese, Hudson ran unsuccessfully for a Virginia congressional seat in 1991, then was given two GOP political appointments in the state before George W lifted him onto the federal bench in 2002.</div><div>
</div><div>Even today, as he sits in judgment of politically motivated cases, Hudson continues to draw annual income as an owner of Campaign Solutions, a Republican political consulting firm. One of its successful clients is Virginia's GOP attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli, who was elected with the firm's help in 2009. Ken just happens to be the official who filed the right wing's case against Obama's health care reform in Judge Hudson's court.</div><div>
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</div><div>ALEC TASK FORCE</div><div>
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</div><div>Civil Justice Task Force</div><div>Justin Amash (R-MI), Member, Civil Justice Task Force[22]</div><div>Rep. Jan Angel (R-WA), Member (2009-2010), Civil Justice Task Force[23]</div><div>Judge Richard A. Bandstra (Michigan 3rd Court of Appeals through January 2003), Former "Public Sector Chairman" (year unknown, but during the time he was a Republican Michigan state representative from Grand Rapids, 1985-1994), Civil Justice Task Force[24]</div><div>Gregory A. Brower (United States Attorney for the District of Nevada, former Republican Nevada State Legislator), Former Member, Civil Justice Task Force[25]</div><div>Sen. Adam Driggs (R-AZ), Member, Civil Justice Task Force[26]</div><div>Del. William (Bill) Howell (R-VA), Former "Public Sector Chairman" (2010), Civil Justice Task Force[27]</div><div>Rep. Lance Kinzer (R-KS), Civil Justice Task Force Executive Committee member[28]</div><div>Marvin Kleeb (R-KS), Member, Civil Justice Task Force[29]</div><div>Rep. Michael R. O'Neal (R-KS), Member, Civil Justice Task Force[30]</div><div>Sen. Debra Plowman (R-ME), Member, Civil Justice Task Force[31]</div><div>Scott Pruitt (Oklahoma Attorney General, former Republican State Senator of Oklahoma),[32] Former "Public Sector Chairman" (2004), Civil Justice Task Force[33]</div><div>Sen. Dennis D. Pyle (R-KS), Member[34]</div><div></div><div>
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</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Articles and reports focusing on the right-wing attack on the judicial system</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Hijacking Justice: The Federalist Society, a Right-wing network of lawyers, judges and supporters, is undoing civil rights and other gains made through the courts [122], George E. Curry & Trevor W. Coleman, Emerge, October 1999</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Federalist Society Becomes a Force in Washington, Conservative Group's Members Take Key Roles in Bush White House and Help Shape Policy and Judicial Appointments [123], Thomas B. Edsall, Washington Post, April 18, 2001</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; A Hostile Takeover, How the Federalist Society is capturing the federal courts, [124] Martin Garbus, The American Prospect, March 1, 2003</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Justice For Sale: Shortchanging the Public Interest for Private Gain [125], Review and Commentary by Richard L. Grossman, The Workbook, Fall 1993</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Federalist Society and the Challenge to a Democratic Jurisprudence [126], Institute for Democracy Studies, undated</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Attack on Trial Lawyers and Tort Law [127]. (PDF file, approx. 1 MB.)</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Also available in an online HTML version [128], David C. Johnson, Commonweal Institute, October, 2003</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Vast Right-Wing Collusion, Biased Judges, Big Money, and Tax Exempt Organizations Force Their Agenda [129], Mike Kress, American Politics Journal, March 16, 1999</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Federalist Society, The Conservative Cabal That's Transforming American Law [130], Jerry Landay, Washington Monthly, March, 2000</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Don't Be Fooled. They're Activists, Too [131], Simon Lazarus, Washington Post, June 3, 2001</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Tipping the antitrust scales, How the right helped make the federal courts safe for Microsoft. [132], Andrew Leonard, Salon, March, 1999</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; ?? THE TAKINGS PROJECT: Using Federal Courts to Attack Community and Environmental Protections [133], Douglas T. Kendall & Charles P. Lord, Community Rights Counsel, April, 1998</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Issues Groups Fund Seminars for Judges [134], Ruth Marcus, Washington Post, April 9, 1998</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Right's Judicial Juggernaut [135], Jack Newfield, The Nation, September 19, 2002</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power [136], A Report by the People For the American Way Foundation, undated.</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Federalist Society [137], Right Web Profile, November 30, 2006</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Judges get FREE lessons on property rights [138], Dustin Solberg, HighCountryNews.org, July 6, 1998</div><div>
</div><div>&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Judges' Free Trips Go Unreported, U.S. Jurists Say They Forgot To Comply With Ethics Law [139], Joe Stephens, Washington Post, June 30, 2000</div><div>
</div><div>
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</div><div>The initial introductory chapter I did not find particularly helpful and can be bypassed. The book begins to hit its stride in the second chapter on the "liberal legal network." It is helpful to have handy a copy of Laura Kalman's perceptive "The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism" to fully ingest the author's analysis. Basically, the author suggests, a combination of liberal legal groups (e.g., NAACP LDF; ACLU), elite law schools and their liberal faculty, the American Bar Association, and especially the Ford Foundation during the 1960's formed a potent coalition pushing the incorporate of liberal ideas into the law. This is, of course, also the era of Warren Court activism. Particular important in this regard was the "Gideon" decision which in turn led to the development of the Legal Services Program which unleashed numerous law suits pushing liberal ends in public interest litigation. Much of this activity was encouraged by generous support from the Ford Foundation. This activity generated a conservative response via conservative public interest law firms such as the Pacific Legal Foundation and the Chamber of Commerce. However, because of being controlled by business interests, lacking academic support, and making tactical mistakes, the first generation of conservative public interest firms generally was not successful.</div><div>
</div><div>A highly favorable development was the introduction of "law and economics" into legal analysis, and the two chapters devoted to this topic are among the best in the book. Particularly important in this regard are, of course, Judge Posner, Henry Manne (who established various programs at several schools and remade George Mason Law School), and the Olin Foundation, which becomes sort of the conservative Ford Foundation. Probably the strongest chapter in the book is devoted to the Federalist Society, which skillfully lays out its history, goals, and methods. The author is insistent that "boundary maintenance" separates the FS from its members'political activity, but I found this argument less than convincting. The FS did provide a network of highly skilled lawyers and faculty who generated vital legal analysis to support the conservative legal movement. So, when the second waive of conservative public interest law firms arrives in the late 1980's ("Center for Individual Rights" and the "Institute for Justice"), it is successful given the lessons of the past, the presence of the Federalist Society, the academic foundation laid by the law and economics movement, and highly effective leadership.</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
</div><div>user rev of Teles , Steven M. The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton Studies in American Politics: Historical, International, and Comparative Perspectives)</div><div>&nbsp;</div><div>
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