Grisham Book Is Low Blow to High Court
by J. H. Huebert
Columbus Dispatch
April 17, 2008
John Grisham’s latest novel,
The Appeal, has been at or near the top of The New York Times
best-seller list for more than 10 weeks.
Like any Grisham novel, it keeps you turning pages to see what happens
next. But unlike some others, this one has a political message it wants
to send — especially to Ohio readers, whom Grisham believes shouldn’t be
allowed to elect members of the state Supreme Court.
The plot involves an evil corporation (of course), which has polluted a
Mississippi county with cancer-causing chemicals. A victim sues and wins
$41 million.
Fearing more big judgments, the corporation appeals — and seeks to fill
a seat on the state’s elected supreme court with a hand-picked candidate
who will overturn the verdict. What’s a few million for a campaign next
to the possibility of hundreds of millions lost in litigation?
The corporation’s high-living chief executive cackles as his scheme
comes to fruition.
All of this is intended as an attack on states where judges are elected
— Ohio in particular.
Indeed, Grisham has said he was inspired to write the book when he was
“clipping out articles about the Ohio Supreme Court” and how the
justices’ campaign contributors supposedly benefited from the court’s
“pro-business” decisions. “I don’t think we’re that bad in Mississippi,”
where the book is set, he adds.
Grisham’s attack, however, amounts to little more than cartoonish
propaganda and a gross distortion of what’s happened in Ohio.
Like any good plaintiff’s lawyer, Grisham hammers the reader with the
sad facts of his contrived case — and this alone, not the law, is
supposed to tell us which side should win.
Readers who would prefer to inform their opinions with fact rather than
fiction would do well to look at the Ohio Supreme Court’s decisions over
the past decade.
The decisions of the late 1990s are epitomized by Ohio Academy of
Trial Lawyers vs. Sheward, in which a four-justice majority struck
down the tort-reform law, which was enacted to curb, yes, out-of-control
jury awards.
The court struck down the law because the majority justices said it
violated Ohio’s rule that all legislation must pertain to a single
subject. Never mind that tort reform fits most people’s idea of a single
subject. And never mind that, in the past, where the court had found a
violation of this rule, it scrapped the offending portions and kept the
parts that pertained to the core subject matter.
The Sheward decision received nationwide ridicule for its
judicial overreaching. The Harvard Law Review — hardly a bastion
of conservatism — blasted the decision for “usurp[ing] the General
Assembly’s power to self-police” and “undermin[ing] the Ohio Supreme
Court’s valued position as a defender of the state’s constitution.”
Within a few years, following numerous other instances of judicial
activism, Ohio voters replaced three of the Sheward-era members with
justices who promised to exercise judicial restraint.
And it’s true, the result has been good for tort reformers. Last year in
Arbino vs. Johnson & Johnson and this year in Groch vs.
General Motors Corp., the court deferred to the legislature in
upholding major aspects of Senate Bill 80, Ohio’s latest attempt at tort
reform.
But to simply characterize this as a victory for well-funded candidates
who are sympathetic to big business, as Grisham would, is unfair and
inaccurate.
As the Harvard Law Review recognized, it’s not a court’s place to
overturn laws or verdicts simply to help a sympathetic plaintiff.
Instead, the court must follow the law, which usually means deferring to
the policy decisions of elected representatives.
Besides, the current Supreme Court has not been afraid to rule against
powerful business interests when the Ohio Constitution demands it.
For example, in Norwood vs. Horney, the court held that local
governments could not use eminent domain to take private property and
give it to businesses for economic development. You will recall that the
U.S. Supreme Court, which is not elected and, therefore, accountable to
no one, notoriously reached a contrary conclusion about the U.S.
Constitution.
Grisham apparently thinks voters are rubes easily bamboozled by
business-backed candidates.
The best-seller list and the Ohio Supreme Court’s current composition
suggest, however, that Ohioans know whom to choose when they want
entertainment, and whom to choose when they want justice.
© 2008 Columbus Dispatch. Reprinted with permission.