Posted on 05/21/2002 8:52:14 AM PDT by ElkGroveDan
Davis hints he’d support reparation suits. He should think again.
Should insurance company executives, employees and shareholders — not to mention people who pay the premiums — be penalized for actions of corporate forebears 15 decades ago? Advocates of slavery reparations answer yes. Logic and justice say no.
Earlier this month, California officials released details on pre-Civil War insurance policies on slaves written by companies that are still in business in one form or another. Attorneys pushing class-action lawsuits on behalf of descendants of slaves claim this data will help make their case in court.
They’d better be wrong — and not just for the frequently cited reason that these suits are profoundly divisive in grouping people by race and inflaming old resentments. Just as troubling is the threat that these suits pose to a vital legal principle — the rule that there must be time limits on launching litigation.
If you think you have a legal claim against someone else, the law has traditionally said “use it or lose it.” Your right to sue has an expiration date. Statutes of limitation, by opening and closing a window for bringing a lawsuit, help ensure that litigation gets off the ground before witnesses are in the ground and turned to dust. They also protect all of us from drowning in a sea of summonses based on unlimited accountability for our own pasts — and our ancestors’.
The reparations cases challenge the principle that lawsuits cannot be filed today based on wrongs of the distant past; therefore they raise a potential liability peril for everyone, regardless of color or background.
The main legal claim in the reparations lawsuits is “unjust enrichment.” This is a cause of action for which states generally set a statute of limitations of no more than half a decade. New York, for instance, where the first reparations suit was filed this past March, has a 6-year statute of limitations for unjust enrichment claims. In California, courts view unjust enrichment as a contract-related claim, with a limit on filing suit of two years from the time of the alleged injury. So an action against an insurer, or any other party that allegedly profited from the slavery system, could have been brought no later than the late 1860s or early 1870s.
Reparations plaintiffs argue that courts should effectively ignore the statute of limitations — or postpone the point at which the statute’s time-clock starts running — because, they claim, they only recently discovered their link to slave ancestors or the defendant- companies’ link to slavery. But this is a slippery argument. Facts about who was a slave, and what companies helped finance slavery, would have been openly available to serious investigators in the immediate post-Civil War era, before the statutory period had run.
If reparations advocates find activist judges who’ll let their lawsuits go forward — if, in other words, they succeed in weakening the principle that civil liability has a prescribed shelf life — don’t be surprised to see a flood of lawsuits over ancient feuds and injustices. Did a company post “No Irish need apply” in 1849? The owner’s successors or heirs could face a class action by modern O’Reillys and O’Rourkes. Is there a slickster in your family tree who sold wagons with faulty wheels or horses with wobbly legs? Conceivably you might be sued by descendants of someone he hoodwinked. Lawsuit exposure might become everyone’s curse at birth, because no one is without an ancestor who wronged the ancestor of somebody else; and even where there isn’t an ongoing corporate entity to be sued, inventive lawyers can spin creative theories that can make mere individuals the heirs of “unjust enrichment.”
Slavery was evil. But there is nobody alive to be punished for an evil that ended in 1865. As a practical matter, suing insurance companies means suing their people. Probably some of those people are descendants of slaveholders — while some are descendants of abolitionists or Union infantry, and some, offspring of immigrants who arrived long after the Civil War. Thousands of blacks work in the industry as well. All these people have two things in common: 1) They’ve never owned slaves, and 2) they could take a financial hit if their companies are shaken down for millions.
None of this keeps some politicians from offering a supportive word for the reparations concept. Gov. Gray Davis, for instance. Recently, standing beside Jesse Jackson, who was calling for broader probes into insurers’ pasts, Davis commented: “Clearly, we want to right any wrongs and do justice to people who were taken advantage of.”
He had better think carefully. If corporations or associations carry inherited guilt, wouldn’t it be fair also to call the governor’s own political party to account, and demand a payout from campaign warchests? The Democrat Party of the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s was a bulwark of the slavery cause. Its leaders included Mississippi Sen. (and later Confederate president) Jefferson Davis; Chief Justice Roger Taney, whose Dred Scott decision forced slavery into federal territories; and Stephen Douglas, who ran for president against Lincoln on a platform endorsing the Dred Scott ruling.
Should Democrat Party Chairman Terry McAuliffe get a summons to answer for the slavery supporters who led his Party 160 years ago? It’s unlikely Gov. Davis would say yes — so he ought to pause before considering an endorsement of similar treatment for insurers.
The reparations movement fixates on the past and picks at society’s scabs. True social progress follows a different path: the route that our legal tradition stakes out by putting a stop watch on civil liability. At some point, moving ahead in life requires moving forward and electing not to be enslaved by sins or sufferings of the past.
Harold Johnson, a member of California Political Review’s editorial board, is an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation (www.pacificlegal.org).
I'd recommend doing the same with Bill Clinton, but we're still trying to sort out exactly who his father was.
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail.
As it is sometimes the case with whore's, we will never know.
Okay I'm in on that one..... Oh boy, Im gonna get BILLIONS!
Bump!
This is just another shakedown. Mark my words, if this issue sprouts feet, the various state AGs, as well as the Feds, will find a way to get their cut. First it was tobacco extortion, now it's about to be fast food (obesity), so then why not reparations. Just another legal racket, courtesy of the slimeball activists and their sleazy politician friends.
If there's a God in heaven, I certainly HOPE so! That would be beyond funny, and the true definition of justice.
By the way folks, people are stopping me at intersections and asking for a "Dump Davis" bumpersticker after they see mine. Keep some handy...
Start with Jessie Jackson, see who his ancestors were or John Conyers, who does he claim was a slave? Maxine Waters should provide her family tree, heaven only knows who could sue her for past crimes committed by her ancestors.
Gray Davis has to be really stupid to give credence to any of this and any judge who allows this in his/her court should be disbarred and thrown off the bench! Better yet, start with the Africans who SOLD Africans into slavery in the first place, get them to pay Jessie some money. It would seem Black Americans are still being used and abused by their own race!
Davis is hard up for votes eh?
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