Cancelling the hecklers

Now an emeritus professor at George Washington University Law School, Banzhaf, 82, is among the most accomplished and aggressive public interest lawyers in the United States. His first legal jihad, waged in the 1960s against Big Tobacco, resulted in strict advertising restrictions on cigarettes as well as a ban on smoking in airplanes. Since then, Banzhaf has led litigious crusades against fast food chains, religious universities, and private clubs, using legal action—or the mere threat of it—to effect social change.

He’s hardly a right-wing zealot. It was Banzhaf who proposed and popularized the idea of appointing a special prosecutor to investigate former president Richard Nixon, setting in motion the legal drama that would ultimately end his presidency. A half century later, he filed a complaint with Georgia election officials over former president Donald Trump’s 2021 call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger—in which the former president pressured Raffensperger to overturn the state’s election results—leading to a multi-year investigation and several subpoenas.

Now, though, this self-proclaimed "legal terrorist" has set his sights on an unlikely target: the Stanford Law School students who shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan.

Banzhaf told Stanford earlier this month that he will file a character and fitness complaint against the students with the California state bar.

"It appears that you have not taken any steps to discipline or otherwise sanction the student violators," Banzhaf said in a letter to Jenny Martinez, the law school’s dean, who has since ruled out punishing the hecklers. As such, the complaint "will have links to video recordings of the disruption so that bar officials can judge the students’ conduct for themselves."

The California bar requires applicants to demonstrate "respect for the rights of others and for the judicial process." That means the students who disrupted Duncan—in part by telling him "we hope your daughters get raped"—could be in for a rude awakening if Banzhaf makes good on his threat.

This incident "seriously calls into question whether these students have proper temperament to practice law," Banzhaf told the Washington Free Beacon. "It is completely unacceptable to shout down any speaker—much less a federal judge—and then face no consequences."

Such statements have made Banzhaf the strange bedfellow of Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas), who this month urged the Texas bar to "take particular care" with graduates of Stanford Law School. The horseshoe suggests that outrage about Duncan’s treatment crosses partisan divides—and offers a blueprint to fill the disciplinary void left by other elite law schools, which have refused to punish blatant violations of their free speech policies.

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

As an attorney for 35 years, some advice for young attorneys:

Watch how Mr. Giuliani represents his client and, under similar circumstances, do the opposite.

Do not try your case in the court of public opinion.

Do not reveal confidential discussions with your client.

Do not reveal confidential discussions with your adversary's lawyer.

Do not place your interests above your client's interests.

Do not speak publicly about your case unless necessary to correct a prejudicially false statement by your adversary.

Do not make any public statements unless and until you thoroughly understand all of the salient facts.

Do not make truthful statements that inculpate your client.

Do not make untruthful statements that exonerate your client and will undermine your credibility with your adversary and the tribunal.

Be modest, humble, and truthful, not brash, egotistical, and untruthful.

Limit your role to the legal issues and leave public relations and political implications to others.

Be someone of whom it is said, "There goes a fine lawyer whom I would trust with my life and livelihood."

In other words, young attorneys, emulate Mr. Mueller and his colleagues and reject those like Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Cohen, Mr. Cohn, and most of the attorneys surrounding our President.

Your reputations will remain intact and, more importantly, your clients will be better served, and the public's confidence in our great system of justice will be strengthened and not diminished.

 - Mr. Didier of Charleston WV from here.

My highly negative opinions about Mr. Trump notwithstanding, I think it very important that he have good legal representation for the sake of our legal system and more broadly, the country. Unfortunately this has far too often not been the case. There are a number of factors that have contributed to this reality, his reputation as a difficult client who routinely ignores sound legal advice being high on that list. But the other big problem is that he tends to gravitate towards people with similar personality traits to his own. Which is to say that he likes blowhards and television talking heads. Especially those who appear on FOX News. Whether the individual actually has a clue, or is spouting silly conspiracy theories, or simply inventing facts are not terribly important to the Client in Chief. What matters to Trump are unwavering loyalty and a willingness to loudly defend him on television.

This is not to say that Mr. Giuliani is a clueless talking head. But his legal background has been on the other side of the aisle, i.e. as a prosecutor. The rules of the game are very different for criminal defense lawyers. And his behavior has been astonishing to say the least. Trump needs to shut up, and hire the best criminal defense lawyer that his substantial fortune can buy and then follow their advice, to the letter.

Since none of this is even remotely likely to happen, I will go out on a limb and predict that Mr. Trump's eventual collision with reality, when it happens, is going to be spectacularly ugly. But it will probably be must watch TV.

Judges are voiding fraudulent lawsuits

On March 7 a California appellate court upheld a trial judge’s finding that what had been billed as a watershed liability verdict against Dole Food over pesticide use in Nicaragua was actually the product of a conspiracy by corrupt plaintiffs’ lawyers. That decision came only three days after a federal judge in New York ruled that a multibillion-dollar pollution judgment against Chevron (CVX) in 2011 was so tainted by bribery and coercion that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.

Meanwhile, in Texas, a prominent class-action injury lawyer faces mounting woes because of allegations that he faked thousands of damage claims against BP (BP) related to the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill. When you combine these cases with the criminal convictions several years ago of plaintiffs-bar titans Mel Weiss, Bill Lerach, and Dickie Scruggs—all of whom served time for corrupting the civil justice system—it’s hard to deny that there’s deep dysfunction within a powerful portion of the legal profession that claims to fight corporate abuse on behalf of the little guy.

Read the rest here.

The Greatest Legal Letter Ever

Hands down. I was laughing so hard I had trouble breathing. Go here.

Among the careers you might want to skip

Lawyer... Inside The Law School Scam

How to Avoid Jury Duty, Leave Your Vote With the Foreman and Go to Cancún

I love this blog.

It’s Raining Lawyers in the Gulf

Depressing but probably unavoidable...

Turn on a radio or television in Louisiana these days, and out comes a gusher of news and commentary on BP’s unstoppable oil leak in the gulf. Even commercial breaks are no escape from the oil onslaught.

In New Orleans, for instance, the Lakers-Celtics N.B.A. finals game last week repeatedly featured a law firm’s ad urging viewers to visit bigspill.com or to call 1-800-BIG-SPILL if they had been harmed by the slick. Similar pitches flood the radio waves.

Some lawyers are taking a lower-budget approach. For the past month, Spencer Aronfeld, a Miami lawyer, has posted a half-dozen YouTube videos chronicling his travels through the gulf to view the oil’s devastation – and presumably to sign up a few clients.

In the first video in the series, shot in the New Orleans airport, Mr. Aronfeld describes a “very emotional experience” he had while flying over the oil spill from Miami.

“We’ve rented a car, we’re going to drive down the coast, we’re going to roll up our sleeves, take our briefcases out, and find out how we can help people who depend on this environment, and to hold those people responsible who have caused this horrible, horrible disaster,” he says. In another, viewable above, he visits a Vietnamese shrimper thwarted by the spill who is hoping for alternative employment.

That lawyers are homing in on what is shaping up into one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s history should surprise no one. Tens of billions of dollars are at stake, and with the much-vilified oil giant BP as a defendant, lawyers sense a major opportunity. One commentator quoted in Britain’s Globe and Mail newspaper recently described the BP blowout as “the trial lawyers’ Full Employment Act.”

Read the rest here.