Louisiana Rips the Mask Off U.S. Chamber of Commerce Smear

Louisiana's Chief Justice Catherine Kimball is blasting the bogus and destructive “survey” released by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform this week that “ranks” court systems and business climates based on the views of out-of-state corporate lawyers.  Remarkably, the Chamber has chosen to attack Louisiana for years as it has struggled to recover from Hurricane Katrina. The Times-Picayune reports:

"I strenuously object to the ILR's taking the opinions of just a few attorneys who may never have set foot in Louisiana and making pronouncements about our courts," [Chief Justice] Kimball said in a statement released this week. "Whether we're rated highly or poorly, this survey is not a valid measure of the efficiency or fairness of Louisiana's courts." …

Kimball noted a study by Cornell University law and statistics professor Theodore Eisenberg, who said the Chamber survey "lacks elementary social scientific objectivity." The respondents to the survey are not required to have any experience in the states they rank but only need to say they are "somewhat familiar" with a state, Eisenberg said.

"A person can be 'somewhat familiar' with a state's courts because of a single high-profile case or because of a novel or movie based in that state," said Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Greg Guidry, who is on the ad hoc committee. "Those might be honest perceptions, but they have no validity."

Kudos to justices Kimball and Guidry for standing up to this spurious affront to the state of Louisiana, knowing how difficult this is for any judge to do.  Indeed, one of the more outrageous things about these “rankings” is that they take advantage of a courts’ general reluctance to discuss politics.  Judges themselves are barred by ethical rules from saying anything related to issues that might come before them.  It is a longtime problem for judges who have been attacked in increasingly nasty, costly and sometimes deceitful judicial election campaigns (which we covered yesterday) – and by similarly invalid “reports” from other tort reform groups. 

Back in 2000, the New York Times covered the issue of attacks on judges, quoting Georgia Supreme Court Justice Leah J. Sears who noted the difficult challenge for judges: “[T]he target of false accusations in a race for the bench cannot fully respond to them: in addition to the rules forbidding candidates to mislead voters, Georgia, like most states, has rules that bar judicial candidates from discussing how they would vote on issues that might come before them. 'He could pretty much say anything,’ Justice Sears said of [her judicial election opponent], 'and I could not answer. As a judge, I am stuck.’”

Similarly, Eisenberg, who is Professor of Law and Adjunct Professor of Statistical Sciences at Cornell, noted in his withering critique of the Chamber’s rankings: “[T]he Chamber attacks an institution that is not accustomed to defending itself.  State judiciaries lack the resources to respond to the Chamber’s media campaigns and professional norms prevent the judiciaries from fully responding even if they could.”

Speaking of Professor Eisenberg, whom Cornell cites as one of the “foremost authorities on the use of empirical analysis in legal scholarship” (his reputation and work speak for themselves), the Chamber got Humphrey Taylor, Chairman of the Harris Poll, to try to smear Prof. Eisenberg with the suggestion he may have been paid to do his critique – which he clearly was not and has said so. Check out the comments here.

Dare we paraphrase Joseph Welch at this point? (“Let us not assassinate this lad further, Mr. Taylor. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir?)