It should be abundantly clear by now that the coming judicial appointment wars will not be waged between the left and the right. Rather these battles will be fought between the pro-corporate-rights and the pro-community-rights contingents. If there’s any doubt, it should be extinguished by Timothy O’Brien and Jonathan Glater’s profile of the government investigation into the Milberg Weiss law firm in today’s New York Times.
Milberg Weiss is the US’s premiere class-action law firm, winning decades-worth of multimillion-dollar judgments against corporations. Last year William Lerach left Milberg Weiss to start a new firm in San Diego; Melvyn Weiss retained control of the New York firm bearing his name. There’s no doubt that both principals are the kind of lawyers Americans love to hate, but there’s also no doubt that lawyers like Weiss and Lerach work to ensure corporate accountability and deter corporate crime (Milberg Weiss, for example, is probably best known for its litigation against Enron).
Make no mistake that the government’s investigation into Milberg Weiss is politically motivated. President Bush has made tort reform a centerpiece of his legislative agenda and earlier this year signed a law making class-action lawsuits in state courts more difficult to file. In early 2002, federal prosecutors began subpoenaing law firms that had worked with Milberg Weiss, just as the Enron scandal was reaching the public eye. Last May, Milberg Weiss brought a federal suit against Halliburton Company, charging the corporation with defrauding investors by manipulating and falsifying financial statements between 1998 and 2001; Vice President Cheney was Halliburton’s chief executive officer during three of those four years. Millberg Weiss is also a benefactor of the Democratic Party, ringing up more than US$400,000 in political contributions during the 2004 election cycle.
Perhaps reflecting the weakness of the government’s case, federal prosecutors have asked both Lerach and Weiss to waive statute-of-limitations requirements. Both have refused.
This probably wasn’t the first shot fired in the judicial appointment wars, but it’s certainly one of the loudest.
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