Tag: Lawsuit

Governor Granholm says Attorney General Mike Cox does not have the constitutional authority on his own to unilaterally decide the state's position on the issue of healthcare reform. She says the main client of the Attorney General is the Executive Branch.

Granholm has asked Michigan's attorney General Mike Cox to intervene on behalf of the state to support her position on the health care bill.  Cox filed a suit along with other attorneys general to stop the bill which on its face violates the 9th and 10 amendments, assuming too much federal authority. Granholm wants to give the federal government more authority over Michigan citizens, so she supports the health care takeover.

Clueless.

What most people are not aware of are the thousands of decisions made every day by lower courts. These decisions have a profound impact on our courts, our businesses, our institutions, and our own responsibility and accountability. These decisions magnify the critical nature of selecting judges to sit on the bench. One such case was recently decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which covers Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan.

In Gass v Marriott Hotel Services, the Sixth Circuit reinstated a lawsuit filed by two women against Marriott and an exterminating company, in which the women claimed that they were injured by pesticides sprayed in their Maui hotel room after they complained about seeing a dead cockroach.

This case is especially troubling because of the following:

Thus, there was no evidence that the plaintiffs were actually exposed to any harmful chemicals or that the exposure was at a level that is harmful. As a result, there is no way the plaintiffs could establish that exposure to a chemical actually caused them any harm. Nevertheless, in a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit found there was enough to send the case to trial.

Of course, this result was a foregone conclusion. The majority consisted of Judges Eric Clay and Karen Nelson Moore, both appointed by Bill Clinton, while the dissenter, Chief Judge Danny Boggs, was appointed by President Reagan.

This case and others like it weaken evidentiary requirements, making it easier to file and pursue marginal, even frivolous, lawsuits. This increases the expense of doing business, will drive up insurance costs and prices, and further burden our courts while making it more difficult to get rid of groundless claims.

This is nothing new, of course -- read The Litigation Explosion or anything else by Walter Olson. It illustrates, however, the continuing crisis in our courts, driven by the tension between the rule of law and the political desire to bend (or ignore) the rules to promote a social agenda.

Just another reason why judges -- and votes -- matter.

The penultimate sentence in one of my recent posts was "Never underestimate the creativity of a plaintiff's lawyer and a desperate debtor." As if on cue, enter the City of Detroit's former mayor and leading debtor, Kwame Kilpatrick, and his attorney, Florida's well-known Willie Gary. [If you've been preoccupied during the last several years, there's a timeline of Kilpatrick's scandals here.]

On March 10, in a Mississippi circuit court, Gary and Kilpatrick sued SkyTel, reportedly for the nice round sum of $100 million, for allegedly violating the federal Electronic Stored Communications Act. The gist of the lawsuit, which can be viewed here, is that by releasing text messages between Kilpatrick and others, principally his former chief of staff, Christine Beatty, SkyTel invaded Kilpatrick's privacy and violated federal law.

Read more below the fold.