This thread hasn’t been awake for a couple of years, but the story this time isn’t surprising, only sordid.
The private judging industry needs stronger oversight, California’s chief justice said, following a Times report last week on the role for-hire judges played in Los Angeles attorney Tom Girardi’s suspected swindling of clients out of millions of dollars in settlement money.
Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye called revelations about the conduct of the retired judges, including a former state Supreme Court justice, “shocking” in a statement to The Times, acknowledging, “There are not adequate safeguards regarding the business of private judging.” [Los Angeles Times]
How bad is this collection of cases?
For decades, Girardi paid well-regarded private judges as much as $1,500 an hour to help him administer mass tort cases involving thousands of clients. The Times described how Girardi traded on the names of these former jurists to deflect questions about missing money and how, in some instances, they aided his misappropriation of client funds.
In one settlement in which a former appellate justice was paid $500,000 to oversee the distribution of funds, Girardi managed to divert millions of dollars from a settlement account for questionable purposes. A downtown jeweler received $750,000 for what court records show was the purchase of diamond earrings for Girardi’s wife, Erika, of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” fame.
Classic pecuniary corruption, eh? But surely this can be corrected –
[The outgoing chair of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley)] said he was skeptical of a legislative fix to the problem, given opposition to prior proposed legislation to bring more transparency and public safeguards to the arbitration industry. Those measures, he said, were vigorously contested by corporations and business groups that favor the system that allows them to settle disputes out of public view, adding, “I’m not sure these ethical lapses bother them that much.”
“Those are very, very difficult bills to get through the Legislature, because those who stand to benefit from the way the arbitration system works oppose us at every turn, and that is to the detriment of consumers,” Stone said.
This isn’t to say that public justice is without corruption; the oversight of the judiciary by the Senate speaks to the negation of such a foolish assertion. And, of course, attorneys can also be corrupt.
Properly understood, this sort of article rebuts any claims that private justice is immune to corruption. Worse yet, the multiplication of avenues of corruption, as Assemblyman Stone narrates, further taints the idea of American justice; it suggests that private justice is worse than public justice when it comes to corruption.
Private justice isn’t about justice, but about minimizing the cost of wrong-doing by corporations.
