In The Appeal John Grisham attacks the dirty subject of judicial elections. The books centers on a corporation that poisons a local town, loses a big civil judgment and then does what any mega-corporation would do...it finances the campaign of an appellate judge, gets the judge on the bench, who then rules in favor of the corporation wiping out the judgment. The book is a strong indictment of our system of selecting judges and the practice of judges ruling on matters for companies that financed their campaigns. This played out in real life in the Supreme Court case Caperton v. Massey (incidentally, Massey, the corporate defendant in the case is the company responsible for the recent horrific mine accident in West Virginia).
These corporate shenanigans are playing out in Maryland right now, although the case does not involve judicial election.
Perdue Chicken is one of the largest corporations headquartered in Maryland. Problem is that they are accused of polluting the waters along the Eastern Shore. Local residents who wanted take on the corporate giants found support at the University of Maryland Law School Environmental Law Clinic who have filed lawsuits against Perdue for violating the Clean Water Act. Perdue, of course was satisfied to allow the legal process to run its course, and to prove its case in court. Not quite.
Perdue was incensed. It went to the people that it financed into seats in the legislature and complained that law students at a publicly funded university were using government money to hold Perdue accountable for environmental crimes. The legislature sprung into action.
Apparently with a straight face, the legislature demanded that The University of Maryland produce a list of all plaintiffs represented by the law school clinics. The legislature went further and threatened to withhold funding for the school unless the clinics revealed information arguably subject to attorney/client privilege. Just to be clear. The legislature was threatening to withhold money from a law school in order to intimidate the school so that it might stop bringing lawsuits on behalf of Maryland residents suffering from alleged pollution caused by violations of the Clean Water Act by Perdue.
Apparently, a compromise was reached. The threat of withholding money was removed from the bill. The University of Maryland now merely has to provide a narrative of non-privileged information about the cases handled by the Environmental Law Clinic. Again, just to be clear. The state legislature is now going to get a list detailing the actions of the work of one single law clinic all because the students there had the audacity to accuse a large Maryland corporation of violating the law. It honestly could have come straight out of a Grisham novel.
I went to law school at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. Granted, it was a private law school, so this specific type of government heavy-handedness would not exactly work. But similar abuses are easy to imagine. Cardozo's Innocence Project has helped free hundreds of wrongfully accused convicts, some of whom were imprisoned from cases that embarrass the prosecutors' offices. Imagine if the New York City government told Cardozo's dean it would no longer hire any Cardozo students unless Cardozo ceased affiliation with the Innocence Project. Cardozo's Tax Clinic represents low-income taxpayers in audits, administrative appeals, United States Tax Court cases, offers in compromise, and other tax collection matters. Imagine if the IRS or State Dept. of Taxation and Finance threatened Cardozo's tax status unless they agreed to stop contesting tax cases.
I am not Keith Olbermann. I do not have a "Worst Person in the World" segment on my blog. If I did, the next few weeks it would be won by every Maryland legislator who even remotely supported this provision. I don't have a fix. I don't have a remedy. All I know is that as a graduate of a law school clinic, and one who beat the State of New York of behalf of an unpopular client, I found this story too disgusting not to blog about.
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