EVERYTHING THAT LIVES AND MOVES: A Confrontation with the Origin of Natural Evil by Howard Siegel

Author:Howard Siegel [Siegel, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Right Angle Books
Published: 2022-11-14T19:00:00+00:00

18

Many a Slip, Twixt Cup and Lip

A month after Billy’s first-round knockdown of Rick Hawkins, et al. the defendants tried another approach. They filed a motion to dismiss the class action count of the lawsuit on the grounds that it would be impossible to identify the members of the class who had been defrauded. To maintain a class action, the courts insist that the allegations of reliance upon misrepresentation must apply to every member of the class. Likewise, the damage calculation must be amenable to a perfunctory calculation. The court will not get mired down in hearing thousands of individual claimants, some of whom may have relied upon fraudulent misrepresentations and some of whom may have given Pastor Rick money for reasons having nothing to do with the misrepresentations.

“The damages must be amenable to precise calculation and the plaintiffs have the burden of proving that whatever damages they are claiming were caused by the defendant’s conduct.” Billy read the pleading and his heart sank. He was not a class action lawyer. Neither was Jamie Stewart, and this was a defense neither one of them had anticipated. Without the class – thousands of them – they would have nothing but the damages of Mabel Seabrook. Pocket change for a megachurch pastor like Rick Hawkins.

The oral argument did not go well. Judge Alex Richardson was a no-nonsense by-the-book, balls-and-strikes kind of jurist. A fair man who regarded listening as his most important job and to whom logic and reasoning were the Bible. He had ruled for Billy on the first motion to dismiss because he had the better end of a very close argument. After six months of grueling depositions and discovery, the defense decided to use a different tactic. If Billy Callan wanted to play ball in the class action park, he would have to play by class action rules. Those rules had become tougher and tougher over the years thanks to abuses by the class action bar, the most famous of which involved a ridiculous class action filed on behalf of fans of the R & B singing duo Milli Vanilli. The suit sought damages for fraud because Milli Vanilli turned out to be lip-syncing at their concerts and hadn’t actually recorded their best-selling album, “Girl You Know It’s True.” A fraudulent misrepresentation if there ever was one. Who cares? Did not appear to be a legal defense although commentators claimed it should have been. The suit gave the field of class action law a black eye that would never heal.

Judge Richardson could not see how Billy Callan could get around the idea that proving individual damages attributable and caused by the reliance of individual class members on Pastor Hawkins’s fraudulent misrepresentation was even a conceptual possibility. The rules on this issue had tightened considerably both at the Federal and State levels in response to the avalanche of absurd class action strike suits being filed everywhere. Strike suits were suits filed by lawyers who knew that the threat of protracted litigation and huge verdicts was enough to coerce an easy settlement.

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