April, 2006

The President’s Thoughts

Recently retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor urged a conference of attorneys at Georgetown’s Corporate Counsel Institute to speak out on the importance of judicial independence. "You have an obligation to speak up. Statutes and constitutions do not protect judicial independence — people do. We must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary. There is no natural constituency for supporting judicial independence. Therefore, lawyers and others must foster a culture in which such threats to independence are frowned on. The time has come to put an end to the threats. Lawmakers should not demand that a judge issue rulings that meet their nakedly partisan, result-oriented reasoning or pay lip service to judicial independence only when a court’s decision goes their way."

Instead of speaking up to support judicial independence, a few weeks later a "poll" of Corporate America’s lawyers was released, "rating" the legal systems of the 50 states, casting Illinois in a poor light compared to Missouri in The Tale of Two States. The "poll" was rolled out by slick and grotesque full-page color ads entitled Please Don’t Feed The Trial Lawyers. (Here’s a great idea-the next poll could ask convicted corporate executives what they think of the criminal justice system.)

The ads used made-up statistics to claim that our economy is being hurt by Illinois courts. What are the facts about our economy? Here are just a few. This February, 11,000 new jobs were added. In 2005, unemployment reached its lowest level since 2000. In 2005, Illinois was the 6th largest exporter in the US and had record-high exports, 19% more than the previous year. In 2005, Illinois-based Caterpillar had its best year and 4th quarter in history, adding 6,000 jobs. And a survey by the National Association of Manufacturers found that a major corporate problem was filling open job positions.

So what is Corporate America really up to? Consider the following (somewhat edited) segment from Mario Cuomo’s July 1984 speech A Tale of Two Cities.

This is how we were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. "Government can’t do everything," we were told. "So it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class." It was called "trickle-down" when Hoover tried it. Now some call it "supply side." But it’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is to stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.

It’s an old story. It’s as old as our history. Corporate America believes that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, and some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail.The strong,they tell us, will inherit the land.

We believe in something else. We believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact . And we have done it more than once, ever since Franklin Roosevelt lifted himself from his wheelchair to lift this nation from its knees — wagon train after wagon train — to new frontiers of education, housing, peace; the whole family aboard, constantly reaching out to extend and enlarge that family — all those struggling to build their families and claim some small share of America. For nearly 50 years we carried them all to new levels of comfort, and security, and dignity, even affluence. And remember this, some of us in this room today are here only because this nation had that kind of confidence. And it would be wrong to forget that.

For years, when a person on the wagon train suffered an injustice, the courts and the rule of law have been open to dispense justice. Corporate America simply doesn’t want justice for people to continue getting in the way of its accumulation of even more power and profits and enrichment of its shining city for the privileged few. Corporate America is determined to take the hope of justice away from the people. Don’t let that happen.

Keith A. Hebeisen, President
Illinois Trial Lawyers Association