The Tortellini

Professor Scalia?

If this isn't a reason for recent law school grads to throw their lot in with the right wingers at the Federalist Society, I don' t know what is...

For the Ted Frank fan club

For all of you who've enjoyed the vociferous comments here from AEI's Ted Frank, here's your chance to see him in person. Ted will be appearing next week in D.C. on a Federalist Society panel discussing the Class Action Fairness Act. He'll appear with other tort reform luminaries such as John Beisner, the O'Melveny & Myers attorney who reportedly wrote CAFA, and a couple of people on the other side, including John Stoia Jr. from Lerach Coughlin.

I wish I could be there myself, but I will be on an airplane. But these Federalist Society things are open to anyone willing to pay the $20 for lunch, so if you're in the neighborhood, you really ought to stop by--and let me know how it goes! I may entertain a guest post.

Federalist mailing misfire

This just came in the mail from the Federalist Society:

Dear Ms. Mencimer:

We would like you to consider becoming a James Madison Club member by contributing $1,000. This will help the Federalist Society continue to profoundly influence all levels of the legal culture. If you are unable to contribute at the Madison Club level, your tax deductible contribution at any level would be very much appreciated...

The right-wing legal group is apparently far more open-minded than I ever suspected, if they want money from me! Of course, their fundraisers clearly don't read The Tortellini very regularly, or they'd know that I'll need a lot more Google clicks before I could ever afford to be a member of that club. Thanks for asking, though..

Federalists in a Funk?

After spending a few hours at the Federalist Society's national convention Thursday, I just couldn't bring myself to return for any more right wing legal ranting. Fortunately, the Washington Post and the New York Times decided to check in for a read on the conservative post-election climate. Strangely, the Post found the wingers upbeat, while the Times found the Federalists a little forlorn..

Denying Climate Change During a Tornado Watch

Yesterday afternoon, for the sake of the four devoted readers of this blog, I decided to brave the 60 mph winds and torrential downpour, ignore the tornado warnings, and head down to the Mayflower Hotel to see what the was happening at Federalist Society's national convention. The convention is a three-day affair dedicated to what you might call "wing law." It's filled with strict constructionists and libertarians all espousing radical theories of law and economics, plus luminaries: Yesterday's rock star was Sen. John McCain, whose speech you can read about here. The day was capped off by a black-tie gala headlined by none other than Justices Scalia and Alito.

I didn't get to go to any of the headline events (Alito sold out far in advance). I did, however, attend a session on climate change litigation and the supreme court case, Massachusetts v. EPA,  that's coming up for oral arguments on the 29th.

Federalist Society events are usually major sausage fests--if you see a woman, she's generally a member of the "communications profession" or somebody's wife. But the climate panel was actually moderated by a woman judge. Of course, to earn a place at that table, a woman has to be to the right of Attila the Hun. Fifth Circuit appellate judge Edith Jones fit the bill.

During oral arguments in a sexual harassment lawsuit once, Jones said of the victim, "Well, they didn't rape her, did they? And when her lawyer said that a man had pinched the woman's breast, Jones replied, "Well, he apologized."

Jones set the tone for the panel by scoffing at the notion that the earth was getting warmer. Then Lee Casey, an attorney from Baker & Hosteler, got up and told the group that he was a "global warming skeptic," because the fact that there was a scientific "consensus" on climate change meant that competing views were just being censured, and that Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," was just "a little too convenient." His observed that environmentalists had referred to naysayers as Holocaust deniers and Al Gore had called them "flat earthers"--clearly all signs that the minority view in the academy was just too threatening to the environmentalists' "orthodoxy."

The discussion of the global warming lawsuits, which are based on a novel "public nuisance" claim, seemed secondary to bashing climate science. After listening to these guys, I though the Holocaust-denier analogy sounded about right. I also wondered if global warming were caused only by cow farts and not the burning of their big corporate clients' fossil fuels, whether any of them would be up there making these speeches at all. Anyway, you didn't need Al Gore to tell you that something weird was up with the weather yesterday. All you had to do was go outside.

Federalist Power

Liberal legal wonks have long fumed about the power of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that counts three sitting Supreme Court justices among its members, as well as a host of other federal and state court judges and numerous Bush administration officials.

Next week, the group's connections will be on prominent display at its National Lawyers Convention here in D.C., where keynote speakers include: Justices Alito and Scalia, Vice President Dick Cheney, Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff, Sen. John McCain, and solicitor general Paul Clement. Not even the ABA can pull off that kind of line-up....

See Me, Hear Me

Speaking of Harold See...

Legendary political consultant Karl Rove helped put the Alabama justice on the bench in some of the nastiest and most expensive judicial elections on record (more on this in my forthcoming book). The Alabama court races foreshadowed many of the techniques Rove later used to put George W. Bush in the White House.

For instance, a former Rove staffer told Josh Green in the Atlantic Monthly that in See's 1994 race, someone from his camp started a whisper campaign that his opponent was a pedophile. See lost, but went on to defeat a guy who ran ads comparing him to a skunk in 1996. Rove's firm also handled See's ads in his 2000 Republican primary challenge against former chief justice Roy Moore, of Ten Commandments fame. The misleading and allegedly false ads prompted the state's judicial inquiry commission to charge See with violating the judicial cannons. (See lost the race but kept his old seat after the ethics charges were dropped.)

So today, as the Federalist Society lunch, I figured See would cite his bruising experience to support the new conservative calls for replacing judicial elections with merit appointments. Instead, See passionately defended elections and voters' ability to choose decent candidates. At least, he said, the process is more transparent than having the governor puts his college roommate on the bench.

See's faith in the average citizen's good sense, though, apparently doesn't extend to those in the jury box. I can't vouch for these numbers (consider the source) nor do I know how See voted in these cases, but according to Alabama trial lawyer Jere Beasley's monthly newsletter, of 31 cases decided by the Alabama Supreme Court in 2004 and 2005 where a victim won a case and a defendant appealed, the court upheld but four jury verdicts, or less than 8 percent.

How to get covered on C-SPAN

The influential conservative legal group, the Federalist Society, counts three sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices among its members, along with a good chunk of the federal bench. As such, it's a major player on Washington's rubber chicken circuit. Today's event was a panel discussion at the National Press Club on judicial elections, featuring Alabama supreme court justice Harold See Jr. and Indiana chief justice Randall T. Shepard.

Usually these Federalist lunch things cost twenty bucks ($15 if it's at Tony Cheng's, the venerable Chinatown institution), so I couldn't figure out why this one was on the house. That is, until I got there and discovered that C-SPAN would be broadcasting the event. No doubt most of the audience had a deep abiding interest in judicial independence issues, but the elderly woman seated next to me had no idea what the program was, suggesting that the food, not conservative legal theory, ensured the TV cameras would pan a packed house.