Malefactors of great wealth

National Review, Sept 14, 1992

EVERYONE KNOWS about the $550 million Drexel Burnham's Michael Milken made back in 1987. But why are we not reminded that Milken was out-greeded that year by a Houston trial lawyer, Joe Jamail? He made somewhere between $450 and $600 million, mostly by talking a Texas jury into accepting the unprecedented proposition that unsigned contracts could be binding. His victim, Texaco, the country's third-largest oil company, was forced into bankruptcy.

Might it be because trial lawyers are overwhelmingly liberal Democrats? Forbes writer Leslie Spencer won a Loeb Award for her 1989 article listing lawyers, typically personal-injury lawyers, enriched by the interaction of the contingency-fee system with the consumer movement's campaign to erode tort liability limits. It has become a big business: contingency fees now amount to over $10 billion a year. Miss Spencer found more than sixty plaintiff attorneys making in excess of $2 million a year--and just one of them a self-proclaimed Republican. He was also a Teddy Kennedy fan.

In this year's August 31 Forbes, Miss Spencer surveyed the trial lawyers anew. She found overwhelming evidence of Clintonomania among them. Trial Lawyer Associations in the various states have been shaking down their members; trial lawyers occupy key Democratic fund-raising positions--for example, in Florida and in Arkansas itself--and some big earners are openly boasting about their role. Chicago's Philip Corboy (1991 earnings: $8 million) and Tom Demetrio ($6.5 million) got around the $1,000 personal-donation limit by raising $31,000 from their firm's 18 lawyers and spouses, and gave another $25,000 to the Democratic National Committee. The Federal Election Commission doesn't really enforce the rule requiring that donors' professions be reported. But a CNN-sponsored study by the National Library on Money & Politics found nearly 40 per cent of identifiable Clinton donations came from "lawyers," five times any other source.

Clinton recently told a National Association of Manufacturers meeting that he didn't "know what should be done yet" about tort reform. But Philip Corboy is confident that the Democratic nominee actually opposes it. "I looked him in the eye and asked him," he told Miss Spencer.

Liberal trial lawyers are a relatively new disease in America. The tort crisis--the creation of liberal judges-is only three decades old. But it's a burden on the economy that already amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. Contributions to Clinton are designed to keep that burden there--and growing.