The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times

The Chief's Year-End Report

Tonight's the night for champagne, Auld Lang Syne -- and the chief justice's end-of-year report on the state of the federal judiciary. In his two prior reports as chief justice, available here, John Roberts Jr. has followed the lead of his predecessor William Rehnquist by pleading for pay raises for federal judges. We have not yet seen the report, but Roberts will probably strike the same note again, given that in spite of some progress on the issue, Congress at the last minute failed to approve raises earlier this month. But Roberts may still have kind words for Congress because it did pass legislation that increases penalties for assaulting or threatening judges. We reported on this legislation at an earlier stage here.

Stay tuned here and on legaltimes.com and law.com sites for full coverage of the report, expected sometime after the ball drops at midnight tonight.

Bush Veto Threat Tied to Pending Lawsuits by Iraqi Victims

President George W. Bush said today he will veto a bill providing billions of dollars for the Defense Department because the Iraqi government is concerned that it could expose Iraqi assets in American banks to legal claims by victims of Saddam Hussein, The New York Times reports.

The Times reports that one pending lawsuit seeks $1 million or more, and the Bush administration says the Iraqi government cannot afford such losses. A presidential spokesman says a section in the law would permit plaintiffs’ lawyers to freeze Iraqi funds, and the White House will work with Congressional leaders to fix the bill when Congress resumes in January.

But the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) say they were taken by surprise today, the concerns should have been voiced earlier, and the veto could hurt Americans serving in the military.

In 2003, the Bush administration opposed a judgment against Iraq for torturing American prisoners of war in 1991, arguing that Bush had granted the country sovereign immunity for actions committed by the Saddam Hussein regime. Read the Legal Times story from 2003 here.

The New Face of Lobbying Disclosure

The Lobbying Disclosure Act Database maintained by the Secretary of the Senate looks a little different this afternoon. In fact, so does the entire web site at www.senate.gov/lobby, one frequently used by lobbyists and reporters alike.

The upgraded database, which went live at noon today, allows users to sort results by filing year, client, date received and other criteria, something that wasn't possible before. The database can also be downloaded by year. Also new: a database of outside paid travel records.

The new web site was upgraded according to requirements in the the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. When The BLT tried to search lobbying records, clicking on results yielded an error message, but we're hoping that won't last long.

Damage Cap

Attention trial lawyers: Yesterday the Ohio Supreme Court upheld a state law that limits how much someone injured by a defective product can collect in pain-and-suffering damages.

The 5-2 majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Thomas Moyer, said the law did not violate the constitutional rights of those injured by keeping them from a trial by jury, from a remedy for injuries, or from due process and equal protection.

Under the law, awards can be up to three times the amount of economic damages, with a limit of $350,000.

Halt this trial in the name of partying!

West Baton Rouge Parish District Judge Alvin Batiste, presiding not far from the campus of Louisiana State University, postponed a trial scheduled to start the day LSU plays Ohio State in the BCS national championship game.

Stephen Babcock, a lawyer defending Imperial Casualty Insurance Co. in a car accident lawsuit, requested the delay partly because he has tickets to the Jan. 7 game at the Superdome in New Orleans. And also because Babcock already rented out the second floor of a Bourbon Street bar for a pre-game tailgate party.

In the written request for a new trial date, Babcock refers to Ohio State as "Slowhio."

"All counsel to this matter unequivocally agree that the presence of LSU in the aforementioned contest of pigskin skill unquestionably constitutes good grounds therefor," Babcock wrote. "In fact we have been unable through much imagination and hypothetical scenarios to think of a better reason.

The Morning Wrap

Bhutto Mourned Hundreds of thousands of mourners saw the body of Benazir Bhutto laid to rest Friday, as violence flared up in cities across Pakistan. Her assassination Thursday throws Pakistan’s politics into tilt less than two weeks before parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 8. (NYT, WSJ, WaPo, LAT)

Politics as Usual The opposition leader's assassination was a powerful undercurrent in presidential politics Thursday. The Washington Post has this A1 story on how Bhutto's death is being spun by Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.), one week ahead of the contest in Iowa.

Giuliani's Drugs The New York Times has this story on Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani's work for drug maker Purdue Pharma. The former mayor was hired to help stem the controversy over OxyContin, a painkiller that prosecutors said was more addictive an dangerous than Purdue let on. Giuliani's job was to convince public officials "that they could trust Purdue because they could trust him."

Fighting Foreclosure The Wall Street Journal recounts the tale of Richard Davet, who staved off foreclosure of his six-bedroom home in suburban Cleveland for 11 years. More folks are mounting legal defenses against foreclosures, which often go uncontested in court, but few have gone this far. Out of his house a year now, Davet is suing for his home back plus damages.

Talking Turkey

President George W. Bush signed the appropriations bills earlier this week, but he did so with caveats that should strike fear into the heart of many lobbyists. He warned that earmarks are out of hand. He also repeated something he's said before - that earmarks inserted in the conference committee report rather than the text of the bill may not carry the force of law.

Now, it's impossible to say how many of the nearly 9,000 earmarks in the 2008 appropriations legislation were the result of lobbying, but certainly, the number isn't a small one. Lobbyists work to build support for projects in both houses, and they lobby hard to keep earmarks in the process through the always volatile conference that produces final appropriations legislation. And when the earmark doesn't make it into the House or Senate version, it can sometimes be inserted in conference. The process is hugely volatile, with months of lobbying often coming down to a final few, rushed days, a colossal omnibus spending bill, and a final decision that lobbyists can't influence very much at the end.

The drawbacks to appropriations work -- the tumultuous process and negative press surrounding earmarks -- has encouraged some big firms to pull back from appropriations work. Bush's comments are likely to encourage that. For a Legal Times story on why firms are looking to reduce their reliance on appropriations contracts, click here.

NRA Seeks Hurricane Katrina Gun Owners as Plaintiffs

The National Rifle Association has hired private investigators to track down gun owners in New Orleans whose firearms were seized by city police after Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, The Associated Press reports.

In court papers filed Monday as part of a federal lawsuit, the NRA and the Second Amendment Foundation claim that New Orleans officials violated gun owners' constitutional rights in confiscating more than 1,000 guns that were not linked to any criminal cases.

About 700 of those guns were made available by police in 2006 to be reclaimed. However, only about 100 have been returned.

NRA lawyer Daniel Holliday said investigators have located about 75 of 300 identified gun owners, and some of them could be called to testify in a trial set to begin Feb. 19. The NRA is asking for a delay in the trial because it has had a hard time finding the gun owners, many of whom may have fled or relocated after the Aug. 29, 2005 storm.

"That is really the guts of our case -- to establish that there was indeed a pattern of the police going out and taking people's guns without any legal reason to do so," Holliday said.

DOJ Report: Mexican Meth Rules U.S. Drug Market

The good news in the just-released National Methamphetamine Threat Assessment 2008 by the Department of Justice is that domestic production of the illicit drug is down.

However, the victories against clandestine labs in urban and rural America are being overshadowed by the entrenched Mexican methamphetamine producers and distributors who now rule the U.S. drug market. Canada is also exporting the illicit drug across the border, but its production does not rival Mexico’s.

"The increasing prevalence of high-purity ice methamphetamine throughout the country and the expansion of methamphetamine networks operated by Mexican and, more recently, Asian drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) have largely sustained methamphetamine markets in the United States," the report states.

“Mexican DTOs distributing Mexican methamphetamine continue to dominate domestic markets. In fact, distribution of the drug in domestic drug markets by Mexican DTOs is increasing, supplanting many local dealers who had previously produced and distributed the drug independently.”

2007: Deadliest for Police

Record traffic fatalities and a surge in shooting deaths pushed the nation's death toll for police officers to its worst in nearly two decades.

The Associated Press reports via The Washington Post that with the exception of 2001, when 72 of 239 officers died during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, 2007 was the worst since 1989.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund and Concerns of Police Survivors jointly released preliminary data in a report issued today.

As of Wednesday, 186 officers had died on the line of duty -- 81 in traffic incidents and 69 in shootings. Overall, fatalities are up from 145 in 2006, when traffic crashes accounted for 76 deaths and another 52 officers were killed in shootings.