Most of us remember the bizarre court case of Judge Roy Pearson versus the Korean dry cleaners who were sued for $67 million for a lost pair of pants. That case was finally thrown out earlier this year with the Chung's winning , but not before they'd almost lost everything they'd worked for their entire lives due to their legal costs. Judge Pearson would later lose his job, in part because "his suit against Mr Chung demonstrated a lack of "judicial temperament." The Chungs withdrew their motion to recover their own costs and impose sanctions when they recovered their money through fund-raising efforts by benefactors.
But now the so-called "Institute for Legal Reform" (ahem) and their website http://iamlawsuitabuse.org/, an offshoot of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is using this case to push a pro-corporation Republican agenda.
The key to all this is the administration of justice, justice for all. And, the purported fair sounding name of a political action special interest group such as the Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) does not mask its real intention of protecting insurance and big business, period.
The Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform has unveiled a slick new PR campaign to convince Americans that the little guy, and not, say, the enormous corporations that fund the campaign, is at risk of personal disaster at the hands of a greedy trial lawyer.
While the medium is new for the Chamber, the new lawsuit abuse videos consist of the same old corporate propaganda bashing the civil justice system, and most of it is highly misleading. One of the segments features a "victim" that was actually a plaintiff in a lawsuit. Particularly egregious is a video of a Georgia professor who specializes in studying "play." She sweetly contends lawsuits are making children obese because they've taken dangerous playground equipment out of the school yard. The junk food companies that fund the Chamber should be especially pleased with that one. Read more....
