Lawyers

August 25, 2022 By Mychal Massie @ Daily Rant

 

 

I do not know who wrote this or where it may have appeared before.  It was forwarded to me by a friend.  I think it speaks mountains of truth regarding the situation we are confronted with whenever liberals are in control.  I’m sharing it; you decide if it speaks truth to you.

 

As an attorney, I hesitated to forward this as it can be considered to be an indictment against my profession.  But I believe there is much truth to the article below.  Very thought provoking.  Lawyers are adversarial and are trained to try to win at all costs.  It may work in litigation but does not work well when governing our nation.  Trying to win at any costs creates the polarization and hatred that now fills our country and leaves no room for common sense or legitimate debate.

 

Every Democrat presidential nominee since 1984 went to law school, although Gore did not graduate.  Joe Biden (no surprise) was at the bottom of his class.  Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school.  Barack Obama was a lawyer.  Michelle Obama was a lawyer.  Hillary Clinton was a lawyer.  Bill Clinton was a lawyer.  John Edwards is a lawyer.  Elizabeth Edwards was a lawyer.  Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer is a lawyer.  Former Senator Harry Reid was a lawyer.

 

The Republican Party is different.  President Trump was a businessman.  Presidents Bush 1 and 2 were businessmen.  Vice President Cheney was a businessman.  President Eisenhower was a 5 star General.  The leaders of the Republican Revolution: Newt Gingrich was a history professor.  Tom Delay was an exterminator.  Dick Armey was an economist.  Ex-House Minority Leader John 

 

Boehner was a plastics manufacturer.  The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.  Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer?  Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against actor Ronald Reagan in 1976.  The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers.  This is very interesting. I had never thought about it this way before.

 

The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers.  Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Trump, Bush, and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.  The Lawyers Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America.  And so, in the eyes of the Lawyers Party, we have seen the procession of official enemies grow.  Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail?  Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.

 

This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers.  Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, which, in this case should be the American people.  Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.  Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine.  But it is an awful way to govern a great nation.

 

When politicians, as lawyers, begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all-consuming.  Some Americans become adverse parties of our very government.  We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit.  We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.

 

Today, we are drowning in laws.  We are contorted by judicial decisions.  We are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives.  America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked.  When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big.  When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.

 

Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business.  Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work.  Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.

 

The United States has 5% of the world’s population and 66% of the world’s lawyers!  Tort or legal reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits.  This legislation has been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party.  When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association go to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high.

 

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About the Author

Mychal Massie

Mychal S. Massie is an ordained minister who spent 13 years in full-time Christian Ministry. Today he serves as founder and Chairman of the Racial Policy Center (RPC), a think tank he officially founded in September 2015. RPC advocates for a colorblind society. He was founder and president of the non-profit “In His Name Ministries.” He is the former National Chairman of a conservative Capitol Hill think tank; and a former member of the think tank National Center for Public Policy Research. Read entire bio here

 

With claims against pharmacies, trial lawyers are becoming a public nuisance

By Jeff Stier June 9, 2022 @ Washington Examiner 

In America's tragic opioid crisis , trial lawyers believe they have found an untapped well of financial wealth. More specifically, they think they've found a way to collect legal fees by redefining the concept of nuisance laws for their personal gain. This get-rich-quick scheme will only line the pockets of trial lawyers and create new legal hurdles.

In our legal system , nuisance lawsuits were designed to resolve community-level situations such as the presence of malodorous, unsightly, or even toxic debris next to a residence or a contaminated well. An individual or company would only be subject to legal liability under this legal construct if they have caused another person to suffer loss or harm. This structure allows public nuisance laws to punish actions that are already illegal and harmful to communities so that those injured can be compensated.

Public nuisance litigation was never intended to create legal or regulatory standards. Yet that's exactly what trial lawyers are now trying to do.

By attempting to apply nuisance law in ways never intended, they are targeting companies they believe will settle for large sums, including pharmaceutical makers, pharmacies, gun manufacturers, and energy producers. Lawyers have used this scheme to cast a net wide enough to include any sufficiently deep-pocketed company that distributes or sells these products. Under this tortured application of public nuisance, it doesn't matter how the problem began or who is at fault so long as the lawyers get their payday.

This dangerous attempted expansion of public nuisance law is caused by trial lawyers' overreach, according to a recent report from the Heritage Foundation. "In the trial lawyers' conception of nuisance claims, almost anything can be couched as a public nuisance, and trial lawyers stand to gain a huge windfall in contingency fees without having to comply with class action rules if they are successful in persuading a state, city, or county government to let them litigate on its behalf," the report reads.

That's key because, often, it is taxpayers in jurisdictions that hire these lawyers who get left with the big legal fees when higher courts overturn jury decisions because the lower court incorrectly allowed these cases to advance.

A recent case in Ohio is a prime example of how out of control the process can become. Federal Judge Daniel Polster, who oversees all the multidistrict litigation opioid lawsuits across the nation, held a trial against several major pharmacy chains in his Ohio courtroom. Polster, who has been quite vocal about his role in solving the opioid crisis, has pushed for parties to settle cases quickly rather than go to court.

"Polster has pushed the defendants to pay up," the Wall Street Journal recently noted . "When the pharmacies refused, he scheduled a trial in a lawsuit involving the two Ohio counties. He then stacked the deck against the pharmacies and declined to call a mistrial after a juror shared information biased against the defendants with fellow jurors."

Unsurprisingly, that jury decided that several retail pharmacy chains created a public nuisance by failing to do enough to stem the abuse of opioids — even though every prescription filled was valid and the pharmacies complied with all regulations. What's ironic is that pharmacies have been sued for refusing to fill opioid prescriptions , and under this decision from Polster's court, these companies can now be sued for filling a prescription or not filling a prescription. That isn't justice.

Tellingly, the lawsuit was only brought against large chain pharmacies — CVS, Rite Aid, Walmart, Walgreens — not the small, independent pharmacies that fill the majority of opioid prescriptions in the two counties involved in the lawsuit. It's clear this is about targeting those with the largest wallets, not solving the complex problem of the opioid crisis. It certainly isn't about justice.

However, the verdict may only be a temporary victory for the trial lawyers and their shakedown schemes. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has overridden Polster on numerous occasions in these cases. In fact, the appeals court has "chastised the district judge" and said his court "abused its discretion."

Across the board, higher courts tend to be skeptical of the novel application of nuisance lawsuits. In the most recent example, the Oklahoma Supreme Court tossed out a $465 million judgment against Johnson & Johnson in a case employing the same dubious pharmaceutical public nuisance tactic by a 5-1 decision. Late last year, in a case against drug manufacturers, a California superior court judge similarly ruled in favor of J&J and other drug companies.

Despite these rulings from high courts, trial lawyers are not backing down in their effort to use public nuisance law against a variety of industries. Companies are incentivized to settle to avoid even greater exposure to lawsuits. The pressure from trial lawyers to settle creates a vicious cycle because that allows trial lawyers to receive a payday without having to face scrutiny from a higher court.

This abuse of public nuisance law must end. America cannot withstand punitive legal behavior by those who seek to retroactively rewrite laws they dislike. Ultimately, legislatures and principled judges must step up and end such jurisprudential hijacking. The creation of law is the purview of Congress and state legislatures, and trial lawyers do not constitute a fourth branch of government.

Jeff Stier is a senior fellow at the Consumer Choice Center in Washington, D.C. 

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America’s Future Leaders? Don’t Bet On It

Posted on April 1, 2022 by John Hinderaker in Education, Law

Yale Law School has long been a disgrace. I was surprised, when I searched for YLS on our site, at how often we have commented on farcical events there. Way back in 2003, we wrote about Yale Law School’s disgusting treatment of military recruiters. That was followed by Yale’s lawsuit trying to have the Solomon Amendment declared unconstitutional. The Solomon Amendment provides that universities that receive federal funding must treat military recruiters in non-discriminatory fashion. The horror! Yale and its fellow left-wing institutions lost 8-0 in the Supreme Court. Elena Kagan was among those leading the anti-military charge.

In 2014, we commented on a pitifully weak op-ed co-authored by the Dean of Harvard Law School and the Provost of Yale Law School complaining about the fact that police officers were not charged with homicide in the Michael Brown (a clear case of self-defense) and Eric Garner cases.

Then there was the hysterical anti-Brett Kavanaugh letter signed by YLS students, alumni and professors. (“Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination presents an emergency — for democratic life, for our safety and freedom, for the future of our country. … He is a threat to many of us, despite the privilege bestowed by our education, simply because of who we are. . . people will die if he is confirmed.”)

In 2021, we wrote about a controversy over whether the Yale Law Journal is “racist,” even though it accepts black and Hispanic students at rates far greater than whites. Later last year, Scott covered in a series of posts the story of Trent Colbert, a YLS student who apparently didn’t get the memo. After sending classmates a jocular email inviting them to a party at his “trap house,” he was subjected to Kafkaesque torment by the law school’s administration–torment that he resisted, ultimately successfully.

Finally, last month, a group of fascist Yale Law students successfully shouted down a Federalist Society program that featured a dialogue between a leftist and a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom. The protest was rowdy enough that police were summoned to maintain order..............To Read More..

Junk science is no way to win a jackpot: Column

Lawyers in the hunt to strike it rich are ignoring scientific nuance and misleading juries.

Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell

A jury in St. Louis awarded a woman over $70 million last month because her lawyers convinced a jury that talcum (baby) powder caused her ovarian cancer. This is the third jackpot verdict issued by a jury in that city against Johnson & Johnson. Since sharks are smelling blood in the water, surely more lawsuits will follow.

This madness must stop. There is no convincing evidence to support a link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer.

The majority of the data that supports a possible link is based on case-control reports, observational studies that compare diseased people with healthy controls to determine previous exposures. For instance, in May 2016, the journal Epidemiology published a paper that concluded that use of talcum powder increased the likelihood of ovarian cancer by 33%. But hold on.

That might sound like a lot, but consider that tobacco smoke increases the risk of lung cancer in men by 2,300%. Asbestos increases the risk of mesothelioma, on average, by 300% to 700%. By comparison, a 33% increase in ovarian cancer hardly constitutes “slam-dunk” evidence.

Cohort studies, on the other hand, often eliminate this problem by tracking volunteers based on current or recent exposures. Indeed, a new cohort study in Epidemiology assessed women who had used or had not used talcum powder in the past year. The researchers followed up with the women roughly six years later, and they concluded that there was no link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer.

They did, however, find a possible link between douching and ovarian cancer. If true, that might suggest that studies which show a link between talcum powder and ovarian cancer are actually confounded by douching. (In other words, women who douche may also be using talcum powder.)

The American Cancer Society remains skeptical of a link. The organization writes, “For any individual woman, if there is an increased risk, the overall increase is likely to be very small.”
Such nuance, of course, is purposefully ignored by lawyers seeking a jackpot verdict. Nuance and statistical uncertainty, which are inherent to the complex field of epidemiology, are thrown overboard in the hunt to strike it rich.

Numerous examples of such overreach abound. Former senator and presidential candidate John Edwards ignored most expert advice and found the few experts who would agree with him to conduct his personal injury cases. That's unethical and unscientific. The 2000 Julia Roberts movie Erin Brockovich, meanwhile, glorified a $333 million settlement against an electric company for allegedly causing cancer in the citizens of a California town that had hexavalent chromium in its drinking water — but a study 10 years later did not find a disproportionately high number of cancers in the area.

Such perversions of science by the judicial system are why we are in dire need of medical tort reform. Juries of 12 untrained laymen have proven over and over that they are not capable of logically analyzing biomedical and epidemiological evidence. Medical cases ought to be decided by a jury of experts.

Unlike in law or politics, where demagogues insist on black-and-white answers, science is full of gray areas. Unfortunately, we have a legal system that is incentivized to prey upon scientific uncertainty in order to line the pockets of unscrupulous lawyers with multimillion-dollar lawsuits. That won’t stop unless the system is reformed.

Alex Berezow, senior fellow of biomedical science at the American Council on Science and Health, holds a Ph.D. in microbiology and is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Hank Campbell is president of ACSH. Follow them on Twitter @AlexBerezow and @HankCampbell.
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The Times Says “Most Lawyers” Won’t Take Age Discrimination Cases Anymore. Really?

By Daniel Schwartz on August 26th, 2013

In Tuesday’s The New York Times, an article (that, as of Monday evening was one of the lead pieces on the NYTimes.com website) argues that age discrimination continues to exist in society and that it is hitting the baby boomers particularly hard. (Indeed, the article’s tag is ”for-laid-off-older-workers-age-bias-is-pervasive”.) I do not challenge the assertion that age discrimination continues to exist in certain parts of society. The statistics quoted in the article do undermine the article’s assertion though because the unemployment rate for 55-64 year olds is 5.4 percent (compared with 7.4 percent) for the general population. I’ll leave it for others to debate what the statistics mean.

Now, admittedly, the charges don’t account for claims that were filed with an attorney’s assistance

But if “most lawyers” won’t take age discrimination cases anymore, wouldn’t you expect to see a significant dropoff?.......But try telling that to the Times. Indeed, it goes on to make a remarkable, uncredited assertion: “Since the Supreme Court ruling, most lawyers won’t even take age discrimination cases.”

Most lawyers? From where does the Times get this assertion? It fails to say. It provides no statistics, no cite, no quote to support this. Nothing….To Read More…..

My Take – Well, once again the NYT, the so-called Gray Lady, has proven she is in reality an Old Gray Hag. Can you believe anything that appears in the Times? Of course that question is universal for all newspapers and the answer is a resounding ....NO! Newspapers have always wanted to tell the story they want told - truth notwithstanding.

That same mentality permeated the electronic media. Dan Rather, Connie Chung and he rest of his peers practiced it with great glee. They weren't concerned with the facts - or at least the facts that disagreed with the narrative they were promoting - they were concerned with "their" story, not "the" story. Nothing has changed, and because of the internet society has become aware of their lies – both of commission and omission – and newspapers all over the nation are dying. Those that remain will have to make some serious changes…..like telling “the” story instead of “their” story. That will be interesting to watch!