With Tim Russert declaring Barack Obama to be the Democratic nominee the other day, I thought it might be interesting to run his name through the legal databases to see which of his cases popped up. I was familiar with his having “summered” (in the stomach-churning patois of what David Lat calls “BigLaw“) at white-shoe Sidley Austin (he didn’t join the firm, but met Michelle). But out of Harvard Law School, he joined up with the more modest Miner, Barnhill & Galland, variously described as a politically connected Chicago firm.[As Lawyer, Obama Was Strong, Silent Type, By Abdon M. Pallasch, Chicago Sun-Times, December 17, 2007]

Accounts have him working on a mix of everyday cases, but among the ones show to up in one popular database, he’s slugging it out not for the poor and oppressed generally, but blacks specifically. For context, Carol Moseley Braun once worked at the firm. Two examples of his cases are Barnett v. Daley and Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank.

In Barnett v. Daley (United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, 1994, 32 F.3d 1196), Obama was part of team that challenged the racial apportionment of Chicago voting districts as shortchanging blacks, despite the fact that their district power was very close to the black percentage of Chicago’s population. Created were 19 black super-majority districts. Obama’s team wanted 24. At this stage of the case, the brainy Richard Posner reversed a lower court dismissal of the case on the pleadings and sent it back for a consideration on the merits.

Posner recites the Obama team’s information that “no black aldermanic candidate in Chicago has ever beaten a white in a ward that had a black majority of less than 62.6 percent, and it is emphatic that the ward in which the population is 55 percent black is not a black ward–is indeed a white ward, even though only 42 percent of its population is white.”

I am always amused that in this day of finger-wagging that you can’t generalize about race, Voting Rights Act litigation flatly assumes that voters vote strictly along racial lines. “Candidate of their choice” for any group is, duh, a person of the same race as the district.

After consolidation with a similar suit brought by Hispanics and a 48-day trial (I don’t think Obama was involved), Chicago’s map was upheld, whereupon that decision was… upheld for the Hispanics and remanded for the blacks. At this point, I became exhausted reading about Barnett v. Daley.

But it’s interesting that as Obama embarks on reaching out to all colors of the rainbow, he was once arguing that blacks can’t get elected unless they have enough blacks to vote for them. And don’t bother with the “he was just advocating for his client” line: he’s touted his “civil rights” work as part of his true calling.

In another case, apropos of the current mortgage meltdown, Obama was on the legal team trying to get class certification for blacks “victimized” by home mortgage lenders (Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank, 1995, U.S. District Court for the District of Northern Illinois). The charge was that Citibank wasn’t loaning to blacks. The judge granted the certification.

Of course, as has been noted on VDare.com and elsewhere, these legal “successes” probably underlie much of the meltdown today. Banks weren’t loaning to blacks because their credit is often terrible. When the law forced them to anyway, the expected happened. And, as usual, evil white bankers have been blamed for… “predatory lending.”

So, in just two prominent examples, we’ve seen Obama’s mindset revealed, and it’s one of vigorous black racial advocacy. As someone who’d one day like to engage in “white advocacy” in the courtroom, I’m a little jealous that he’s not only gotten the opportunity to fight his fight, but now finds himself running for president with that as a strength, not a weakness.

In the humble Fairfax County tab section of today’s Washington Post, reporter Jerry Markon [Send him mail] tells us of the uptick in pedestrian accidents in the area, which has prompted the expenditure of $400,000 in taxpayer dollars on a new safety campaign: A New Push for Pedestrian Safety | Police Target Drivers, Walkers and Cyclists to Halt Increase in Area Fatalities, April 3, 2008.

What Markon doesn’t say directly (or even ask about) is the obvious: that uptick is almost certainly caused by the influx of illegal aliens. You simply can’t go out driving in the D.C. area without dodging, in any three-mile stretch, a small Hispanic man on a cheap child’s bicycle, weaving wherever he pleases.

Not only does Markon hide this reality, he tries to spin it into something caused by racism and capitalism: “A recent study by Inova Fairfax Hospital found that many pedestrians involved in crashes are from ‘marginalized portions of society,’ including immigrants, the poor, minorities, the homeless and elderly people.’”

Hey, Jerry, maybe it’s not “racism” causing the problem, but the the inability of illegal aliens to follow the American custom of walking on crosswalks. Never mind, I say and say again, that they’re not even supposed to be here to begin with. Why is the cost of their double-layered lawlessness laid at my feet by the government and the media? Would Jerry bother talking to a citizen-motorist about having to dodge the omnipresent Hispanic jaywalkers and median-strip clingers?

The costs aren’t limited to safety initiatives (in English and Spanish, thanks) that soft-headed government officials feel compelled to push. I see personal injury cases where police report witnesses have “Jorge Gonzalez” or “Maria Lopez” running into the street before getting hit by a car. Naturally, this doesn’t stop them from suing the driver for negligence. Often, they pocket huge sums, which are usually paid for by municipalities or insurance companies.

And you know where that money ultimately comes from: those “nonmarginalized” folks we call law-abiding, tax-paying citizens. Ever notice how, for being “marginalized” as a group, illegal aliens spend a lot of time in the middle of the street–and the newspaper page?

After several years as a litigator in New York City, I thought I’d encountered every obscure language that plaintiffs spoke — and demanded translations of to press their lawsuits.

One was an African language called either “Konobo” or “Kron Konobo” (phoenetic, Google doesn’t bring up anything for “Kron Konobo”)[VDARE.com Note: That's Krahn Konobo, one of the indigenous languages of Liberia.] that sent my client scurrying to the U.N. to find a translator. Amazingly, we found one, although the plaintiff’s daughter complained halfway through a deposition that the translator spoke the eastern version, while her mother spoke a western version. I was later told that this language had no written version. Oy vey, as they say.

Here’s one I missed. An Alexandria, Va. judge recently denied a rape defendant’s motion for a re-translation of his entire court transcript (something taxpayers would foot the bill for) on grounds that the first court-appointed translator of Amharic screwed it up. Amharic? Turns out, it’s a Semitic language spoken in Ethiopia.

All of which might make for a nice little geo-linguistics lesson, if we can get past the fact that there’s an Ethiopian running around who shouldn’t be here to begin with, either as an (alleged) rapist or confounder of a legal system that has enough trouble operating under one language.

Funny, I can’t get past that.

I just received an e-mail from one Leslie Inzunza [Send her mail]with tips on how to market to the Hispanic (or Latino - Hispanic might be considered offensive, as the word comes from those dirty Anglos) community. It’s mostly standard marketing stuff, but amusing in its attempt push the “diversity” of Hispanics. You can’t assume all Hispanics are the same, Ms. Inzunza tells us, because they consist of all races and come from 22 different countries. If that’s so, why bother marketing to Hispanics at all?[Marketing to the Hispanic community: habla usted Espanol?]

Probably because, contra “diversity”, they’re similar enough. From where I sit, Hispanics, regardless of national origin, are quick to file fraudulent, groundless or wildly exaggerated lawsuits. I just had to postpone a deposition because the plaintiff has gone back to El Salvador for a while… next week, it’ll be a plaintiff in Guatemala. Apparently, their injuries aren’t so bad that they can’t skip back to Central America for a few weeks here and there.

And, there’s money in it. Juries in many jurisdictions will fork over the cash to these folks, especially when there are fellow Hispanics on the jury.

All of which raises some questions: are lawyers really doing America a favor by marketing to Hispanics, thereby encouraging all the frivolous and costly litigation? Are Hispanics really doing us a favor by pursuing the claims?

The entitlement mentality fueling the lawsuit craze is bad enough when restricted to English-speaking American citizens. But tossing in the ethnic angle only makes it worse.

The Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that manages to attract some of the biggest names in mainstream conservatism for its presentations, is pretty good about making sure that liberals–strong, thoughtful ones–share the dais with the home team. It makes for open, honest, invigorating debate.

But at a recent presentation on the Akaka Bill at the National Press Club, [Audio and Video here]it came up short. Despite repeated attempts to get a defender of the bill to, well, defend the bill, the best they could do was Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, an opponent, and a staffer for Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who also… opposes the bill.

Where were the Akaka people? Not concerned about the bill, in any event, which has passed the House and is expected to pass the Senate.

But as Joe Matal, the Kyl staffer, said, the implications of the bill–outright racial separatism–are amazing to behold. Sponsored by Sen. Daniel Akaka, D-Hawaii, the bill would create what amounts to a sovereign nation of up to 400,000 “Native Hawaiians,” in much the same way Native Americans have sovereignty inside the United States. It would set up governing bodies that would oversee money and land and go so far to allow Native Hawaiians to create their own criminal and civil law.

The true motivation of the bills’ supporters, Matal said, is to get the non-Native Hawaiians, presumably whites, out of Hawaii. “This is secession,” he said.

Prompting the Akaka bill is the series of equal protection challenges to set-asides and special privileges for Native Hawaiians, most of which, like Rice v. Cayetano, have come up losers for the haole-hating set. The Akaka bill would create “Constitutional kryptonite” to ward off those challenges, Matal said.

For Rep. King, the Akaka bill is sailing through without objection because of runaway multiculturalism. And the implications for the illegal invasion of America were not lost on him, as he reminded the attendees of Aztlan in the southwestern United States.

“It’s dangerous to the unity of America,” King said.

And indeed, it may well be. Though to a person who, say, might be in attendance at the upcoming “American Renaissance” conference, the Akaka bill is a double-edged sword. Yes, its passage would essentially be a slap in the face to American whites and a rejection of the settling power of their having conquered American land (and later, Hawaii). On the other, is paving the way for recognition of racial rights such a bad thing, especially for whites, who are projected to be minorities by 2050?

If we are to concede that true nations are based more on “blood and soil” than arbitrary lines on maps, should we be more accepting of the idea of racial sovereignty? No doubt Akaka bill supporters would be highly unlikely to approve of such a thing for whites, but they will be robbed of their objections if the bill passes. If an exploding immigrant population and shrinking white population do mean the end of a meaningful America, why not consider it? What if it actually led to greater peace and prosperity for the groups involved, instead of the laborious fiction that anyone standing on American soil is as “American” as any other?

These questions seem big, but they are not so far off. For both believers in and deniers of racial and ethnic difference, a nation created by the Akaka bill will be something to watch.

Once upon a time yesterday in America, we put up with those annoying “Press one for English, press two for Spanish” telephone time-wasters (and if an economist were useful, he’d tally up the money lost for all those wasted millions of seconds added up).

Not to fear–things are streamlining.  One East Coast law firm specializing in personal injury now just answers the phone in Spanish.

http://www.chandlerlawgroup.com/

Try for yourself and see.  Incredulous after hearing this (I dialed 1-800-488-4LAW), I asked the person if there were an English line.  Si, he said, try 1-888-439-4539.  Dial that for yourself, as well, and see what happens.  Spanish again.

It says something about what’s become of America–and the law–when an enterprise switches from a Spanish/English combo to Spanish alone.  My personal reaction is the same in both languages:  “No.” 

For a lunch escape from the office, I headed for a local fast-food joint with a copy of the Washington Post’s Super Tuesday roundups, complete with an appetite-destroying picture of a victorious John McCain on the front. Unfolding before me in the line was a scene typical of the new multicultural America: A trim, expensive-but-casually dressed white male in his late 30’s or early 40’s was demanding nutrition information from the Hispanic woman behind the counter.

I didn’t catch all the details, but it had to do with corn-based versus wheat-based, or something like that. From the words and tone, it sounded like a persnickety yuppie health concern. As you might expect, the woman behind the counter spoke practically no English. The man angrily demanded a manager. No manager here, the woman said. The man huffed, turned on his heel, and stormed out.

It was a small vignette, but so telling about our times. Here was this obviously well-educated white man, likely liberal-leaning, with concerns about food ingredients that would baffle any resident of the Third World, happy as they would be to get any food, much less gluten-free food. I’ll guess he’s not concerned about immigration, legal or otherwise (but even if he is, let’s more safely assume there’s a huge body of liberal whites out there with big concerns about carbon footprints and glutens who simultaneously denounce as bigoted anyone concerned about immigration). His little food concern evaporates in the world of non-English-speaking people. Does he–or those like him–make the connection? That precious little world of expensive coffees, L’Occitane and Saabs is but a delicate flower crushed under the heel of an advancing onslaught.

Could this be a new rallying cry? Save liberalism: stop immigration.

I took Mrs. Anonymous Attorney to the Kennedy Center last night for the premiere of Indoctrinate U, a new film documentary on political correctness run amok on America’s college campuses. Pre-release reviewers haven’t missed how Evan Maloney, the film’s maker, acts as the right’s answer to Michael Moore, confronting officials outside their offices with a boom mike and camera crew, only to be escorted away by the police most of the time.

Point made: college officials oversee a totalitarian atmosphere of left-wing orthodoxy that holds up “diversity” and “tolerance” as gods, but there’s no real intellectual diversity and breathtakingly little “tolerance” for conservatives, libertarians, Christians, or whites. It’s near-impossible to get them on camera to explain themselves, and when they do, they sound very much like people so pickled by years stewing in groupthink that they don’t realize how ridiculous they sound — or have any idea how to parry with a questioner. A Bucknell professor named Geoff Schneider catches himself referring to “sentencing” a student to sensitivity training, and the odious Noel Ignatiev of Harvard sounded like a talking Onion parody with comments like “whiteness must be destroyed.”

Meanwhile, the real “oppressed” are the dissenting students who are shut up and shut down by the PC apparatus. One white student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo found himself threatened with expulsion and forced psychological treatment for posting a flyer about a black conservative speaker. There’s incredible footage of Ward Connerly being shouted down by “pro-diversity” students, and near-violence breaks out when the Army Corps of Engineers shows up to a campus job fair.

I was disappointed not to see footage of the Minutemen fracas at Columbia. Readers looking for an immigration disaster documentary should check out Byron Jost’s “Line in the Sand.”

There’s a hilarious sequence the movie where Maloney sets out to find the “men’s center” by talking to the sour-faced feminists at campus women’s centers. Appearances by K.C. Johnson, Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) and John McWhorter give the film a boost.

Maloney’s effort is fast-paced and funny, if late: Someone like David Horowitz (who’s not in the film) was chronicling this scandal in “Heterodoxy” more than ten years ago. It also avoids truly politically incorrect territories like racial difference (Jared Taylor’s encounters at a Canadian college or the reactions to Michael Levin at CUNY would have been good examples) and neoconservatism as an ethnically Jewish movement (witness the SPLC’s “investigation” of Kevin MacDonald - though one fears what would happen if a documentarist showed up to the SPLC’s surely heavily-guarded stronghold in Alabama).

Still, Maloney is the first to bring the phenomenon to the screen, and it’s definitely worth seeing.

From Britain comes yet another tale of the irreconcilable clash between “diversity” and the rule of law. A criminal court suspects that a female Muslim juror was, instead of listening to the evidence in a murder trial, listening to her MP3.[British juror arrested after listening to music under hijab, AFP, Jul 9, 2007]

It’s entirely possible for Western jurors to tune out the lawyers while appearing to remain awake, true. But are we helping things by allowing a garment that basically functions as a traveling privacy tent? I suspect that the juror’s cavalier attitude toward the proceedings may have also been helped along by her natural disconnectedness from British society. As a Muslim woman in a far-off land, why should she fret about the fate of the probably British victim or defendant (I presume, given the description of a pensioner in a 50-year marriage), or care for upholding the tradition of trial by jury? I don’t pretend to be a sharia law expert, but I don’t think “trial by jury” is included.

In my own practice, I’ve had potential foreign-born jurors confidently explain to me that they don’t want to serve on an American jury because they don’t like or understand the American system of law (hey, join the club, but…) One woman began her lecture to me and opposing counsel by stating, “Well, in MY country…” MY country? Lady, you’ve been called for jury duty in New York State! (Both New York State and the United Kingdom require jurors to be citizens, not just legal residents.) This is where you live! In the middle of this same jury selection, a female Muslim juror popped up from her chair, arranged her prayer carpet on the tile floor and presented us all with her rear end, presumably because we were facing Mecca. I felt like I was in the middle of a multicultural circus instead of a solemn legal proceeding.

Trial by jury, and the broader rule of law in a democratic society, does not require perfect agreement amongst the citizenry. But it at least requires agreement on the process of dispute resolution. With immigration insanity, we have lost that.