Balancing the Scales of Justice

“These right-wingers define moral values as two things: abortion and gay marriage. For them, moral values are all about their crotches!”
– Bill Press, keynote speech at the Winter 2005 ATLA conference, Palm Springs, CA

What a wonderful 24 hours! You know, people may criticize trial lawyers for getting rich by taking a portion of their clients’ compensations for their injuries. Still, trial lawyers make their money by sticking up for people who have been wronged- even if it is a lot of money. Compare that to the much greater sum of money that Ken Lay and his friends made by bilking Enron stockholders out of billions of dollars and you’ll understand why I’d rather stand with the trial lawyers.

What’s more, it’s awesome to just get off campus for a while and hang out with those who actually live and work in that “real world” we’re always hearing about. The jury selection portion of the ATLA conference was very interesting. I learned a great deal from a talk by the legendary trial attorney Russ M. Herman, a very proper Southern gentleman. I could tell from the way he addressed that audience that he must be an absolute firecracker in the courtroom. I certainly would like to see him perform someday, but not from the defendant’s seat.

The true hilight of the day was the talk by Bill Press, a prominent liberal commentator who often goes head to head with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Pat Buchannan. His talk was on how trial lawyers must move quickly if there is to be any hope of defeating the Bush administration’s tort reform agenda.

He discussed Karl Rove’s hidden long-term agenda with regards to tort reform. I was interested to learn that it has very little to do with protecting doctors, or even with protecting the big insurance companies. The fact is, trial lawyers donate more money to the Democratic Party than any other group. If you decrease their income via tort reform, you decrease the overall amount of money in the Democratic coffers weakening the party substantially.

Rove is fantastic at making people believe that the cost of health insurance is going up primarily because of “frivilous lawsuits.” The truth is that health care costs have risen primarily because the cost of health care procedures has risen. It’s more expensive to perform some of the cutting-edge procedures that are available today than it used to be to perform older procedures. The best way to quickly lower health care costs is to lower overhead by using one, unified computer system to keep track of people’s health records. That way, doctors don’t end up ordering the same tests twice, and you can reduce the number of clerical workers pushing papers in the bowels of the hospitals.

Sorry clerical workers!

After his talk, Mr. Press answered some of my most pressing questions about the potential war in Iran and the possibility of a draft. He believes that we will wind up invading Iran, but that Bush won’t institute a draft because it will be political suicide. I hope he’s wrong on the former matter and right on the latter. I was quite taken with him, as he was a truly cordial gentleman. He even let me take a picture with him.

After his talk, I met another lawyer who recruited me for some ATLA/Democratic Party PR work. It’s volunteering rather than paid, but I’ll gain PR experience and get to further the Democratic agenda! Tally ho!

Now I’m off to do my Queer Theory reading and hang with my baby. It’s our 29 month anniversary today!