Coverage: John O'Brien, Legal NewsLine.

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Judge Streitfeld called the $300 million jury verdict, rendered months ago, "excessive" and "shocking," based on anger (which the judge attributed to poor lawyering tactics on the part of the defense) and not merely on the desire to compensate and punish. The verdict, discussed in POL previously, awarded $56.5 million in compensatory damages and $244 million in punitive damages to Cindy Naugle, an emphysema patient who quit smoking in 1993. Florida law caps punitive damages at three times compensatory damages, absent extraordinary circumstances -- and in the Naug case the compensatories (including millions for pain and suffering) as well as the punitives were challenged as excessive. Under Florida law, judges must reduce jury awards found to be excessive.

The Naug case is currently #1 on the hit parade 8,000 individual suits against cigarette manufacturers that were filed after the Florida Supreme Court decertified struck down a $145 billion punitive class action award on the grounds that smokers must sue individually. That decision held that the class action jury's finding that smoking is dangerous and addictive and causes disease could not be questioned in the individual suits.

Judge Streitfeld did not indicate when he would determine the amount of the reduction.

Since 1990, the sums donated to federal political candidates by lawyers--excluding lobbyists--exceed $1 billion, according to CRP. Lawyers as a group have given more to federal candidates than any other industry or profession. Their ability to keep tort reform out of the health-care reform bills is unsurprising: Congressional campaign contributions by lawyers in the last election cycle were about $25 million more than the combined total of political donations from doctors, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, hospitals and nursing homes.

While some of these campaign donations come from defense lawyers (who also profit from the litigation status quo) giving by plaintiffs attorneys is far higher per lawyer (16 to 120 times greater, depending on the firm, according to Manhattan Institute estimates), and more tightly focused. Over the current six-year senatorial election cycle, four of the top seven donors to the campaign committee and leadership PAC of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) were plaintiffs firms. Plaintiffs firms were the top two donors to Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.).

I go on to list some of the goodies the trial bar has been getting out of Congress, as well as some of the top items on its wish list, many of which will be familiar to the regular readers of this site.

Moreover, I argue that the political power of the plaintiffs' bar is integrally linked to the post-Buckley campaign-finance regime: "Contribution limits favor those best able to 'bundle' donations. The plaintiffs bar, with thousands of well-heeled members willing to write $2,000 checks, is well-situated to play this game."

My op-ed today summarizes arguments and facts presented in much more detail in the Center for Legal Policy's newest installment in its Trial Lawyers, Inc. series, Trial Lawyers, Inc.: K Street--A Report on the Litigation Lobby 2010, which will be available later today here.

He has argued that workers should be allowed to choose only between unions, not between a union and no representation, and he wants employers to be banned from even attending NLRB hearings about union elections. On the subject of the NLRB itself, he has gone so far as to write that "employers should have no right to be heard in either a representation case or an unfair labor practice case, even though Board rulings might indirectly affect their duty to bargain." In other words: "Shut up."

P.S. And a protest in New Mexico.

More: Princeton Lyman (Council on Foreign Relations), NYT op-ed. And also on the Alien Tort Statute, here's a YouTube video in which Linda Kelly, director of legal education programs for the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth at Northwestern Law, discusses the center's efforts related to the statute.