Judge Huck Cites Emily Dickinson And "International Concept of Due Process."

huckdickinsonorder

Ok, maybe not a entirely fair headline, but I have to spice things up somehow.

Actually, this is an interesting order in which Judge Huck denies reconsideration of his refusal to enforce $97 million in Nicaraguan judgments against Dole over alleged injuries sustained from the pesticide DBCP sprayed on Nicaraguan banana plantations.

We've previously discussed this case here and here.

Judge Huck's Dickinson reference brought back some pleasant college memories:

But now, Plaintiffs contend that, unbeknownst to the participants in this lawsuit, including, apparently, Plaintiffs themselves, late arriving, independent legal grounds have emerged that compel recognition of Plaintiffs’ judgment. This alone is reason to deny Plaintiffs’ motion. “The past is not a package one can lay away.” EMILY DICKINSON, SELECTED LETTERS 290 (Thomas H. Johnson, ed., Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 1986) (1914). Rules 59 and 60 do not provide litigants with an opportunity to test new legal theories in the absence of an intervening change in controlling law.

Classy and erudite (and properly cited!), but I might have went with this bon mot:

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ectasty.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.
I don't know, maybe the Judge's reference was more on-point.

Then we have Judge Huck's reference to that dreaded hip Eurobeast, international "law":

In refusing to recognize the judgment, the Court applied the “international concept of due process” outlined by the Seventh Circuit in Society of Lloyd’s v. Ashenden, 233 F.3d 473, 476-77 (7th Cir. 2000). Osorio, 2009 WL 3398931, at *16, 2009 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 99981, at *51.

Woah -- I guess the Judge is unaware of the mild hand-wringing that occasioned Yale Law Professor Harold Koh's nomination to serve as legal advisor to the State Department or Justice Sotomayor's comments on "foreign law" (she actually said Justices Scalia and Thomas had a point).

Old Europe and Emily Dickinson, all in one order -- that must have been one nice Valentine's Day.

Steven Marks Defends Integrity of Nicaraguan Legal System (and also Co-Counsel).

Hi kids, how was your weekend?

The details of mine were quite inconsequential, really.

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink. He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Sometimes he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy. The sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds- pretty standard really. At the age of twelve I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles.......

So are you following the unfolding drama playing out in federal court regarding Podhurst, Nicaragua, and the pesticide DBCP?

It's a role-reversal of sorts for forum non junkies -- normally the defendants are claiming the foreign legal system is okey-dokey, and the plaintiffs are railing against the lack of justice in corrupt courts run by big multi-nationals.

Here it's the opposite -- the Nicaraguan courts have fast-tracked injury sterility claims by farmers involving the pesticide DBCP, and plaintiff's lawyers are seeking to have those foreign judgments honored in federal court in Miami.

But out in LA a state court judge, Victoria Chaney, has questioned whether the claims and plaintiffs in related cases are manufactured, and has apparently implicated Podhurst co-counsel in the Miami cases, Texas lawyer Mark Sparks:

The scam, Chaney wrote, was part of a much wider fraud in Nicaragua -- a thriving industry of manufacturing plaintiffs to capitalize on a justice system rigged against multinational corporations.

At the center of that system, she wrote, is a law passed by the Nicaraguan government in 2001 that ordered the courts to fast-track DBCP claims.

Anybody claiming to have been exposed to the chemical on a banana farm who can produce a lab report showing he is sterile is entitled to damages. Evidence presentation is limited to eight days, after which the court has three days to decide the case. Defendants, such as Dole, must deposit millions of dollars in a trust for the right to defend themselves. They generally don't bother because it is almost impossible for them to win.

As the Florida case is set to restart, attorneys for Dole have already submitted Chaney's ruling to bolster their argument that the $97-million judgment in Nicaragua was a sham.

The plaintiffs' attorneys countered that Chaney's ruling is full of inaccuracies and overly broad.

"It's amazing to me that a judge can criticize in a sweeping way an entire country's integrity and make a ruling on every individual's honesty and integrity, even those who aren't before her," said plaintiffs' attorney Steven Marks of the Miami-based firm Podhurst Orseck.

Chaney's ruling implicates Provost and Umphrey, a Texas law firm representing plaintiffs in the Florida case along with Podhurst Orseck, in the alleged fraud in Nicaragua. Chaney wrote that one of its attorneys, Mark Sparks, was present in a 2003 meeting in Nicaragua at which lawyers, medical laboratory officials and a judge set out a plan to manufacture evidence and bolster cases in the Nicaraguan courts.

In court filings, Sparks and his firm denied he ever attended such a meeting, and argued that Chaney's ruling was fundamentally unfair because it did not offer them the right to defend themselves.

The ruling was based primarily on information from witnesses whose names and unredacted testimony to Dole lawyers remain sealed under an order by Chaney, who became convinced that their lives would be in danger if their identities were made public.

In any case, the plaintiffs' lawyers in the Florida case said they had no involvement in the California cases.

Sparks and his firm released a statement saying they "are confident that our investigation, testing and diagnosis protocols were superior to other firms in this litigation."

In other words -- go pound sand, Judge Chaney.

Our interest in this case has nothing to do with sperm motility or related health issues, I assure you, but we will nevertheless be following this one closely.