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February 28, 2007

A Commitment to the Rule of Law Makes Strange Bedfellows

A
t the time that H. Lee Sarokin, the judge for whom I clerked, was nominated by President Clinton to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Senator Orin Hatch released a broadside that called him "a stridently liberal judicial activist who pursues his own ideological agenda in lieu of applying the law." It was one of the nastier and more hyperbolic characterizations of the career of a judicial nominee that we've seen in recent years.

Perhaps Senator Hatch will wish to read Judge Sarokin's recent blog post on Philip Morris USA v. Williams, the case in which the Supreme Court overturned a $79.5 million punitive damage award against the tobacco giant. From his experience presiding over smokers' personal injury cases against tobacco companies, Judge Sarokin certainly became no big fan of Big Tobacco: he famously suggested in an opinion that "the tobacco industry may be the king of concealment and disinformation." But this doesn't stop Judge Sarokin from seeing that an Oregon trial court violated due process by permitting a civil jury to punish a tobacco company for injuries to smokers other than the plaintiff -- especially where the company stands to be punished for those same injuries in other lawsuits as well.

H. Lee Sarokin blogs, and Philip Morris smiles. A mighty strange "activism."

Posted by Eric at February 28, 2007 9:38 AM