From Mother Jones 11/03 The Making of the Corporate Judiciary
News:
How big business is quietly funding a judicial revolution in the nation's courts...Since 1998, major corporations -- Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the insurance giant AIG, to name a few -- have spent more than $100 million through front groups to remake courts that have long been a refuge for wronged consumers and employees. By targeting incumbent judges, they have tilted state supreme courts to pro-business majorities and ousted aggressive attorneys general. At the same time, corporate lobbyists have blitzed state legislators with tort-reform proposals, overseeing the passage of new laws in 24 states over the past year alone.
Now, with a sympathetic ear in the White House, corporate America is taking its legal agenda to the federal bench with a behind-the-scenes campaign of high-powered lobbying and interest-group advertising. Pryor is just one of the corporate stars. Several of President Bush's nominees to federal appeals and district courts -- and even White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice who now selects federal nominees for the president -- owe their careers to the support of the insurance, retail, and energy industries that got them elected on the state level.
The nominees' legal approaches have been nurtured by a string of corporate foundations that fund university programs and ideological groups like the Federalist Society. And their promotion to the federal bench coincides with an ambitious corporate legislative agenda, backed by more than 475 lobbyists, that seeks to force limits on jury awards and move lawsuits out of state courts, where judges historically have favored plaintiffs. In Congress, the House Majority Leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, has formed a working group on "judicial accountability" to push for the approval of the president's nominees and launch investigations of liberal federal judges. "What you have is a wholesale effort to hijack the federal judiciary," says Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and former corporate defense lawyer. "They clearly want to put in a more conservative judiciary and then start stacking the deck by removing more and more cases to the federal courts."<>
...Those familiar with Rove's operation in Texas now see the same strategy at work in the White House's selection of federal judges. In addition to Owen and Pryor, Bush has nominated Ohio Supreme Court Justice Deborah Cook, who rose to prominence on the back of a statewide business campaign, which helped her raise $650,000 for her 2000 re-election. Other nominees have distinguished themselves as lawyers defending the rights and profits of corpo-rations. Carolyn B. Kuhl, who Bush nominated for the 9th Circuit, represented tobacco and gas companies before becoming a California state judge, arguing against employee-discrimination claims and the right of whistleblowers to sue corporations.
John Roberts, a Bush nominee who recently won confirmation to the District of Co-lumbia Circuit Court, worked as an attorney to strike down new clean-air rules and filed a brief for the National Mining Association, arguing that federal courts could not stop mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia. Business groups cheered the appointment of Jeffrey Sutton, a conservative activist, to the 6th Circuit because of his long record of opposing federal powers over the states, including a successful case that voided federal employee-discrimination laws. Another nominee, Victor Wolski, who was confirmed to the Court of Federal Claims, worked for years as an attorney at the Pacific Legal Foundation, an organization devoted to rolling back the "regulatory state." "Every single job I've taken since college has been ideologically oriented, trying to further my principles," Wolski told a reporter in 1999.<>
...But as with so much in the behind-the-scenes battle for control of the federal judiciary, Wayne's work has escaped public attention. The corporate candidates he represents will reshape America's legal landscape for at least a generation, but their connections remain largely unnoticed.
When Owen came before the Judiciary Committee for her own nomination hearing, she faced only a handful of questions about her corporate sponsors or pro-business agenda. The headline in the New York Times the next day read "Debate on Court Nominee Centers on Abortion." http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_564_... -----
also:
http://courtinginfluence.net/nominee.php?nominee_id=55 http://courtinginfluence.net/stories.php?id=7 "Another Bush judicial appointee with experience representing the mining industry is John G. Roberts, Jr., a former colleague of George Miller's at the Hogan & Hartson law and lobbying firm. Roberts was one of the co-authors of Miller’s amicus brief on behalf of the National Mining Association’s challenge to the government ban on ‘mountaintop removal’. In 2003, Roberts was confirmed to the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where earlier this year he ruled against environmentalists who were pushing for more restrictive government regulations of copper smelters--many of whom are members of the National Mining Association that Roberts once represented. As a lobbyist in the 1990s, Roberts worked on behalf of the peanut industry, pushing federal legislation that maintained government subsidies which the GAO estimated cost consumers $500 million a year. Agricultural and mining interests are often involved in regulatory cases that come before the DC Circuit Court where Roberts now sits."
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Federalist Society agenda
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Yes, it is about the Federalist Society, another well-funded
