Ralph Nader at Berkeley Law

all right good afternoon everybody thank you very much for attending thank you for being here we know that there was it was such short notice but it's a tribute to the university to the law schools at City of Berkeley that we can get a naught or iam well filled with 24 hours notice so thanks for being here as the just to give you a sense of the how the program will proceed mr. nadir will speak for half an hour or 45 minutes half an hour 40 minutes and then he will take your questions in the fireside format to my right please if you would write your questions down on the cards that either have I think they have been provided to you if not raise your hand and one of the attentive card providers will provide you with a card and and then they will be passed up and I will present them during the the discussion part of our program but this is let me introduce then our program and our speaker my name is Ted Merman I am the executive director of the new center for consumer law and economic job here at the Berkeley Law School the center is dedicated to the advancement of consumer law within the legal Academy to the training and the mentoring of law students and to the furtherance of the cause of consumer rights and economic justice in the courts and the Legislature's of this state and of this country the the center I should mention the interim executive director the center is so new that it doesn't exist yet it will exist in as of April I say as of April 2nd to avoid any implications of saying anything earlier than that but we have been brought out of our pre-existence by the remarkable opportunity to host a man who I would call the preeminent consumer advocate of the past half century as you all know and are aware this is National Consumer Protection week I know you've planned your week around this here to celebrate the week and the birth of the Consumer Law Center is as I have said one of the true Giants of consumer law you ask I can hear it what is Ralph Nader done for consumer law what is let me just give you a small taste he's the founder of we'll say several nonprofit organizations that are dedicated to the cause Public Citizen public justice the purge the public interest research groups Congress watch the Center for Science in the Public Interest the appropriately named Appleseed foundation if we have a modern day Johnny Appleseed he's standing here to my right and 50 more I'm trying to found one and it's enough of a challenge he has been instrumental in the passage of landmark laws that we all benefit from the Consumer Product Safety Act the Clean Air Act the Clean Water Act the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act the Freedom of Information Act the truth-in-lending Act the Fair Credit Reporting Act the Equal Credit Opportunity react and I could go on and he has because that wasn't enough created entire federal agencies with others but certainly with his own advocacy the Environmental Protection Agency the Consumer Product Safety Commission the the OSHA the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration by comparison we give Elizabeth Warren a lot of credit for one in the past 50 years just to take one of those examples Nitza the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the design standards and recalls and general auto safety related measures have reduced the rate of deaths per mile driven by nearly 80 percent which has saved according to a an analysis by the Center for auto safety more than three and a half million lives as the nation put it recently and I'll quote this and so the modern consumer movement was born with one man's strategic decision to hire over time thousands of Raiders Nader's Raiders not the guys the silver and black ones down the road to work more on cars than nuclear power pipelines safety food and drug safety airline safety water and air pollution antitrust enforcement corporate governance and shareholder democracy clean energy tax reform income and wealth inequality campaign finance reform pension rights old-age homes occupational hazards health care smoking freedom of information laws multinationals the Educational Testing Service Veterans Affairs Land Management whistleblowing trade policy insurance procurement a seemingly endless list of vital issues with profound real-world consequences and the the article concludes if there had been no Ralph Nader there probably would not have been a consumer rights and corporate accountability movement or at least nothing remotely resembling the hundreds of organizations laws and books that have sprung from his initiatives no living American is responsible for more concrete improvement in our society ladies and gentlemen mr. Ralph Nader [Music] Thank You Ted and ladies and gentlemen obviously I want you to remember this hour and so I'm gonna have to try to produce some deep imprint assertions and declarations and distinctions because the legal system is in very serious crisis far worse than during the McCarthy period in 1950s and you can pick your sector in your area and our profession is not up to it and our law schools are not up to it although they could be and so we're pay attention to this gap don't just ask you how many one ELLs are here how many two L's three L's okay that's not bad usually the one else predominate the two L's get a little bit skeptical the three L's can't wait to get out and risk cynical and so you get they come in idealistic they've been studies about this by the time they're out they're very pragmatic student loans make them even more pragmatic and they go for the corporate law firms so when I was a law student I want to give you a little perspective because you can see that a lot of the changes that have been made compared to what was the situation when I was in law school were due to students student demands students it on sentence student protests pickets you name it and they often had something brave faculty with them but the propulsion that did not come from the top of the law school so I Here I am I'm a first year law student in the 1950s I'm done I look around there five hundred and fifty students and 15 women maybe a couple african-americans no Hispanics and Harvard Law School introduced his first woman student in 1950 now that this was considered the preeminent law school in the country they had the best and the brightest law professors if you didn't believe it all you had to do was ask them and yet they were so myopic that they thought that was a natural order of things that this was a white male province they were gonna get married and have babies why waste a seat with a female student and as far as the minorities go they would have met any qualified minority as long as they had high SAT and SAT scores which of course were systemic Lee rigged against low-income students to begin with so that was the rough cut scene the curriculum was shaped in order to enhance the commercial job prospects of the of the law students so for example we had we had a lot of courses and seminars on securities law property taxation bankruptcy you name it we didn't have a consumer law course we had one clinic there are now 30 at Harvard we we we didn't have anything on corporate crime as if there wasn't a corporate crime wave we had a course called landlord-tenant I don't recall us ever get into the tenant [Music] Harvard Law graduates are going to mess around with tenants the money's with the landowners and you can see it's skewed that way again the professor's never talked about it it was like there's the natural order of things the natural order of things we had a contracts course that hardly mentioned adhesion contracts is all negotiated contracts because that's where the businesses and the law firms we were supposed to be critical of everything including the opinions of learn at hand except we weren't supposed to be critical or know much about the dark side of corporate law firms who came to recruit us because that would upset the equilibrium between the law schools and the law firms that provided them with contributions and material for the purpose area and other links the jokes were designed to acculturate ourselves into the profession as one professor once joke the Harvard Law School in the morning we contract the law of torts and in the afternoon we distort the law of contracts we all laugh knowingly inside joke right and what's happened in the last 50 years that's exactly what's happened we've lost our freedom of contract with contracts of adhesion more than ever and tort law is being shredded by what is euphemistically called the tort reform movement of the insurance and other industries so that they are not exposed accountable accountability in an open law open courtroom with the trial by jury so now you wonder why we're in such trouble when we've graduated generations of law students so unknowing so fact deprived so skewed to represent vendors not consumers to represent giant employers not workers to represent polluters not forces event pollution to represent the power structure not the people who should be the leading beneficiaries of the compassion of the law which if it doesn't spell justice has lost its Rozonda Hector years later the chicago school of law and economics started spreading throughout the law schools and empirically starved ideology filled with hubris and arrogance to a point where and this is a very important human development most of you probably heard of Judge Richard Posner Circuit Court right he's written 40 books thousands of opinions Harvard Law grad considered very brilliant and year after year he would espouse the monetization of legal justice marginal utilities in dollar terms he was a leading architect of the Chicago along economics school and one day he came into class he would teach a class at Huber's Chicago Law School this is an eyewitness account from a suit he walked up to the blackboard and he wrote the word justice across the blackboard and he said to the students you see that word and they all said yes this the last time I ever want to hear that word in my course that's the Chicago School of Law and Economics justice a considered soft normative not precise not quantitative now discernibly rigorous was also considered inconvenient in terms of the legal hierarchy in the power structure a year ago almost year ago justice Posner resigned from the Court of Appeals was an amazing declaration written up in the New York Times by Adam Liptak he said that after seen more than his not quota of impecunious defendants charged with criminal offences poorly represented and driven into imprisonment by a legal system that was discriminatory he was going to devote the rest of his life to trying to do something about it the lesson is whenever you hear people talk about smarts and brilliance and high IQs they can be also massively insensitive and myopic at least he's trying to redeem himself unlike many of his peers in the Chicago School whose influence fortunately is started to wane so here here's what it was like at the law school I'd write a long article for the Harvard Law Record newspaper on the Commonwealth status of Puerto Rico and I'd walked down the corridors between the school buildings and the students said why are you wasting your time on that subject I'd write a long article after visiting the Indian reservations out west American Indians people without a future and they said you know he's supposed to be studied he's supposed to be working for to get that law review what are you wasting your time with this for it got worse I wrote an article that there were 11 states in the 1950s that prohibited women from serving on juries you know the 1950s including Maryland didn't create a third today obviously being up for this is what happens when over specialized minds become narcissistically monetized and they don't look at the big picture and that's why I spent so much of my time on the Harvard Law Record newspaper it's the oldest law school newspaper 1946 that went out to 10,000 Harvard Law School alumni and was the second largest circulation paper of any legal publication in the country after the American Bar Association Journal so my first recommendation if you don't have a law newspaper start a law school newspaper make sure it's in print as well as online doesn't take more than three or four students to pull it off to put out maybe twelve issues a year that's where you're going to be able to deal with the law writ large that's where you're gonna be able to deal with foresight with expectation levels with the dark side of the law with the specter of mass lawlessness by the rich and powerful with the phenomena that you don't find in the Law Review I could never accuse Harvard Law School of foresight because you couldn't footnote it that's how narrow things work you couldn't footnote it why is it worth reading what about imagination what about vision what about expectation level what about idealism what about justice all those were considered intellectually soft empty not rigorous like X 10 B 5 the securities code or the intricacies of corporate taxation or property law or bankruptcy law a massive form of brainwashing and most of us fell for it luckily I didn't fall for it because I had a lucky choice of parents who made me see things that were in plain sight like why weren't their corporate crying courses why wasn't the consumer part of the Harvard Law School curriculum why weren't their clinical trial opportunities why didn't we ever talk about legal history even though it was critical understanding our profession why didn't we ever talk about the difference between attorney and lawyer have you ever had a discussion that in law school here we never did do you know two differences when you are licensed to practice law you're considered an attorney at law you have the legal right as part of a monopoly - torn for your client zealously but what we're not told it's because the canons of ethics impose another obligation on us as lawyers without clients to look out for the administration of justice and the distribution of justice in our society and to make sure institutions arise that are representing the unrepresented and to build structures of reform that is part of our code of ethics and we don't study that at Law School I remember in the contracts book and the property book I desperately searched among the 19th and 18th century cases for cases on slavery they were very highly litigated you know for contractual and property rights purposes but what is publishing kept those cases out of the case books because they wanted to sell their books to southern law schools what you don't see you don't think about you don't read about the cases where contractual disputes and property rights disputes involve the separation of children from their parents and husbands from their wives in the auctions of Charleston South Carolina and the slave market ships marketplaces there's another issue that is never discussed law schools love to say they have legal aid and they have plenums that's an important source of charity legal charity is important it sensitizes you it puts your feet on the ground you meet with real live human beings who are aggrieved and unjustly put upon but if they don't draw the distinction between charity and justice they will never lead you into structural reform and preventive of law you will be working on soup kitchens instead of a political economy where people should never have to go to soup kitchens because they earn a decent livelihood that's the difference between charity legal charity and legal justice there's other aspects which I won't go into but then you say how about today okay we have diversity and what diversity does unquestionably is it gives whole sectors of our population an opportunity for upward mobility according to their talents and energy merits not color gender etc but then you ask the next question it's all about asking sequential questions mobility upwardly for what to go into male-dominated corporate law firms and get the cues and if you don't mimic them you don't advance try to break the mold bust up the routine change the allocation of representative representational resources you don't get anywhere you get along by going along have things changed because there are more women african-americans Hispanic Americans LGBT in the legal system yes but how much have the real structures of power military foreign policy presidential lawlessness the corporate state crony capitalism the corporate supremacists / workers consumers communities corporate globalization corporatized technologies massive manipulation of people through contract division exclusion of people from their right to their day in court irrespective of race color creed gender sexual choice at cetera how much well some has changed at the grassroot level there's been some change due to the diversity the corporation's protected by corporate lawyers are brilliant adjusters they will adjust they'll step back one they'll go forward one then they'll pull it back three and before you know it the diverse population inside the legal profession in the next generation when it loses some of its fervor and forgets where it's coming from and who made it possible in the prior generation they get assimilated and so the issue of corporate supremacy the corporatization of just about everything the giant corporate strategic planning of our electoral system our political system our military and foreign policy our technologies the the strategic planning of our genetic inheritance of our educational system of our consumer levels of incarceration with the credit debbye payment systems the Kanha me of our environmental processes sometimes impeded sometimes challenged with a successful case here and there but the unerring trajectory this subsume the human beings under we the people in the Constitution to the supremacy of corporate state powered the blend of big business and big government designed to serve big business and turn against the very people who have delegated powers to the Republican form of government where are the law schools in Washington now were in the middle of the Trumpster dump we're in the middle not just of a president who's a literate who is a bigot who is a misogynist who is a corporate cheater who is a prevaricator who is you pick your adjectives but who is a brilliant distractor from the next stage of corporate statism and the militarization and the police ization of our public life and foreign policy what has happened to the law which is designed to discipline power is it promoters and protectors and practitioners have not gone to the level of stringency to shield them from being corroded destroyed or manipulated by raw power the tensions between the rule of law and the rule of raw power political power economic power corporate power technological power you name it but it's driven by commercial values commercial values arrayed against civil values have been going on for centuries every major religion warned its adherents not to give too much power to the mercantile class for exactly the reasons then that applied today a monistic reven focus on maximizing profits and the riches of the ruling class colliding with all other value systems overriding and depleting them destroying them marginalizing them co-opting them as the case may be from time to time this is challenged its challenged by the environment along with the civil rights movement the women's movement the consumer movement they don't have the stamina that the commercially driven corporate movement has for obvious reasons it's singular driven and wedded together and never gives up it's part of the DNA of the frailty of human beings and because injustice operates seven days a week the forces of justice have to be capable of rising to that challenge and so what is the deployment of lawyers in our country the usual estimate is that 80% of lawyers represent 20% of the people maybe it's 90 percent now representing 10% of the people the myths of equal justice under law access to justice are just that and so about a year ago I wrote a column entitled Harvard lawless school and I suggested that because in the theatre of the rich and powerful both in government and in the corporate world the specter of lawlessness is systemic it's the norm that the curriculum at Harvard Law School should be split and the students should choose they want to go to Harvard Law School they can study the law the statutes nation's judicial decisions they could pick them apart suggest improvements try to interpret them try to find out how they are interpreted develop with the transactional nature of the routine legal system how the students can choose to go to Harvard Law Lois curriculum and study lawlessness as a systemic discipline lawlessness zones come in many ways we now have a massive lawless zone surrounding the presidency you have one of the nation's experts here on your faculty to teach you how to have a lawless presidency John you for John you and his colleagues there is no Constitution or statute that cannot be bent in the service of raw power presidential power now with the help of the aiders and abetters in the office of legal counsel and the Justice Department under Clinton under george w bush under obama under donald trump is essentially when veered outward bummed bond realest the president is commander-in-chief can now do anything he wants to do in the name of national security he has been allowed by a supine in congress violating its oath of office to uphold the constitution including the declaration of war authority he has been permitted in his reckless bound realist power plays by a judiciary with its artifices of a political question or no standing to sue with arbitrary limitless expansion and its interpretation to do whatever he wants abroad as prosecutor judge jury executioner and cover upper it was Obama basically said in his lone judgment he could kill any American citizen overseas due process laughably necessary right now when it comes to the Armed Forces of the u.s. Empire there are no such things as national sovereignties in the third world drums Special Forces can and will go anywhere in the pursuit of national security imminent threats have been diluted to thousands of miles away articulated verbally it didn't matter this is shaking up the law schools has shaken up the Harvard Law Review has this led to demonstrations has it affected the small talk between law students going back and forth between classes has it led to a break of routine maybe in a few cases we heard from students once in a while but the norm the norm behavior is on the road to complicity on the road to aiding and abetting on the road to shoehorn lawlessness criminal wars of aggression corporate crime waves misuse of taxpayer funds violation of fiduciary responsibilities and on and on you ask yourself if you want to work for corporate law firms you're entitled to find out what you're getting yourself into back in the sixties and seventies some recent law graduates opt out of representing the tobacco industry in Covington New Berlin but they weren't about to make partner anytime in seven years now it's more difficult never to opt out in terms of an act of conscience with these gigantic law firms there are law firms in this country that have more lawyers than the entire number of attorneys in the Justice Department's civil rights and criminal environmental law divisions just one law firm talked about the deployment of lawyers now I want to read you just so you don't think you're hearing outlier type expressions a statement from the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct can't get more establishment right this is a corporate dominated Bar Association just go to their meetings here's what the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct said about the privileges of being a member of the bar short per breath I quote a lawyer is a representative of clients an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibilities for the quality of justice as a public citizen a lawyer should seek improvement of the law the administration of justice a lawyer should be mindful of deficiencies and the administration of justice and quote what percentage of an attorneys time in this country do you think is allocated to that declared mission not 1% which is why a third-year law student named Pete Davis Harvard decided to take hundreds of hours of his time between his 2l and 3l tenure and put out this report called our Bicentennial crisis a call to action for Harvard Law School's Public Interest mission how many of you heard of this this was sent to every Dean of every Law School we got one response 205 Dean's is there an intellectual life on campus outside your coursework now let me tell you what's in this because it applies to you and all law schools the first part he quotes the Harvard Law School's declared mission I kid you not this is not a joke here's Harvard Law School's declared Michigan quote to educate leaders who contribute to the advancement of justice and the well-being of society end quote are you serious Harvard Law School you've contributed corporate crooks running crooked banks and brokerage firms you've contributed corporate senior partners who facilitate in ways that aren't exactly ethical destruction of documents etc facilitate corporate crime create the architects for look at the Wells Fargo you don't think the lawyers Wells Fargo knew the three million customers were being sold auto insurance and millions of others were being imposed upon was new credit card accounts without their knowledge and permission do you really think the architects of Wall Street firms didn't know what was coming and what was going on before the crash in 2008 that took 8 million jobs through country in a deep recession shredded trillions of dollars of mutual pension fund money didn't lead to one prosecution attempt by the Justice Department and then was bailed out by the taxpayer the Secretary of the Treasury at the time secretary Paulson was former chairman of Goldman Sachs came away with 650 million bucks became Secretary of Treasury under george w bush you know what he admitted to the washington post page 1 he bailed out Wall Street here's what he said I knew I didn't have the authorities to do what I did but somebody had to do it those were his quotes do you realize the magnitude of that mission he didn't have the authority to bail on Citigroup Bank of America Merrill Lynch the various banks out west but someone had to do it and Congress let him do it and there wasn't a tremor through 1.3 million lawyers of our land or a shockwave through two hundred law law schools with few exceptions alright here's what he covered he's one of you okay it's 26 years old he starts out with Oliver Wendell Holmes challenge imagine law students reading Oliver Wendell Holmes quite interesting here's what he said they'll be very brief this is a call to action the crisis of our time mass exclusion from legal power who's being excluded from legal power the vast majority of the American people who desperately need lawyers legal aid is starved public defenders are starved in Florida they're paid forty five thousand dollars a year public defender can imagine the caseload furthermore Legal Services Corporation is desired to be faced on closed down by the Trump budget it's not going to happen some corporate lawyers have risen to the occasion and are opposing it but at least imagine the brazen attempt to shut it down then he says Harvard Law Students failure to lead he gives all these cute excuses that law school administrators get well everybody deserves a lawyer graduates take public interest jobs later after they pay their loans students are free to choose their careers this involves factors behind beyond Harvard Law School's control and Harvard Law as a path to the upper class he got any objections to that and Harvard Law School through the eyes of the poor and then he goes on and he discovers an amazing statistic more Harvard Law School grads go to work at corporate law firms in New York City than all the Harvard Law School grabs grads who go to work in 47 of States think of the mission of the Harvard Law School - that kind of default option then he has a reform of the curriculum and then he reforms the cost structure and in the incent with our Bicentennial choice I'll leave this in your library for you to peruse so quickly before we get to our discussion here's what I asked when I was a law student what is it we never discuss we never get talked about and we don't even have extracurricular activity to deal with that's the question you should ask yourself today you'll be surprised by the proliferation of areas that fit those categories the second is why is it a law school can take an aider and abettor of criminal wars of aggression and give him a titled chair and professorship I'm talking about John you don't think this is just freedom of speech and another plaintiff lawyer one of the leading class-action lawyers that it's redistributed billions of dollars from corporate crooks to their consumer and shareholder victims William Lee Reich who was slated after he got out of jail I will get to that in a moment to give a course here ready to give a course nobody knows about corporate crime like Bill Lee right and he was excluded by whoever upstairs or in the alumni learned about it what was lyrics crime compared to aiding and abetting criminal wars of aggression that killed over a million Iraqis socio cited that whole country thousands of refugees dead babies pulverized public services from health to street security without being declared as a war continuing on to the present day saying it was part of presidential power how can bill leak remarks crimes compared you know discharge would there's a doctrine of the lead plaintiff whoever gets the lead plaintiff recognized by judges among the plaintiff lawyers has an outsized role in the strategy in the remuneration of the class action was lesser plaintiff lawyers and he was charged with pain professional plaintiffs to be lead plaintiffs that is that's a significant violation of legal ethics but doesn't warrant several years in jail compared to the crimes of corporate lawyers who are given the title senior partners of prestigious white glove law firms does anybody know the dirty tricks they play that are outright criminal violations so he serves his time honorably he's a good prisoner he gets out and he's about to teach the course here and he's excluded that's the difference depends what structures you serve finally we have a book in your library called no contest corporate lawyers and the perversion of justice in America I suggest those of you who want to go to work for corporations and corporate lawyers leaf through it to see what you're getting into and to see what happens to you when you're not allowed to take your conscience to work when you are a secondary human being in service of your corporate client zealously when you are not a primary human being when you are a tradesperson not a professional person the difference between a trade and a profession is that a profession is a learned discipline with a tradition of public service and a tradition of Independence the last to being surrendered to the incarceration of the legal profession by the corporate supremacists in return for a very lucrative client ruling aeration just think of them think of what you're going to look back on fifteen sixteen thousand days from now when you retire perhaps you'll have more Bionic equipment in your body and you can go twenty thousand days and you look back and you see that you miss the train of justice that you were representing perpetrators of injustice not the aggrieved not the innocent not the victims and then you are rationalizing it by saying everybody deserves a lawyer yes indeed Exxon Mobil General Motors Pfizer Kennecott Copper Prudential Insurance they all deserve lawyers but they don't have to deserve you because I'll always be able to have lawyers it's not like saying you're representing the poor because everybody poor deserves lawyers there's a different marketplace operating here the great lawyers are those who have great expectations of themselves who stretch their potential for justice which senator Daniel Webster once called the great work of human beings on earth for without justice there is no freedom and there's no liberty and human possibilities are severely restricted I commend the new Consumer Law Center they're going to do great things you're going to do great things your work can reverberate throughout the land to be an example for other law students you can upend the contracts of adhesion and the contract P&H and servitude that encircles hundreds of millions of people in this country you can strengthen the law of torts and prevent the law of contracts of adhesion from cannibalizing the law of torts and taking away their right to open court and trial by jury because you are the conscience of the profession you understand that the corporate lawyers cannot look you in the eye when you challenge them because you're not showing them dollar signs in your eye you're the conscience I've seen it happen in the past you could stare them down if you want to make sure that you're going to be a lawyer as well as an attorney in the advancement of justice in our country and if you need a reference point go back to what the law students did in the 60s and in the early 70s and the civil rights women's rights 8 to the poor environmental movements and how they raided the law firms that came to recruit them on pro bono basis and they talked to the law firms and said what are your pro bono policies what are your conflict-of-interest policies what are your subtle penalties for people who join you and don't want to represent the vile clients that have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths by deception and child molestation like the tobacco industry and see what they did see how it an editor of your law review Michael tiger would have national press conferences with articles in your law review because he thought the public has a had a right to know what the law review was revealing if you don't think high enough of your own significance and you become a technician you become the harbor of low expectations the corporate law firms will oblige you the world's problems are not going to be treated or or solved by corporate law firms they're far more likely to be created accessor baited and institutionalized by the nefarious brilliance of these corporate lawyers it's your choice thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so for those who can remain thank you very much if you have written questions please do pass them to the aisle ah some of you have written questions terrific and we will move on to the fireside part of our chapter I will get right to it but if you have further questions yes just raise your hand and let me just very briefly say thank you to the events team that put this together in less than 24 hours all behind the scenes are just fantastic and without them if this kind of thing wouldn't happen okay question for you hi I'm a student activist with the CALPIRG chapter at UC Berkeley student purge helped create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a few years ago and we know that it's being attacked at the federal level what what is the future or what might the future of the CFPB be and how can we work to protect it so this is where we want the brains of law schools you have that you have heads of the EPA and the CFPB who have openly said Scott Pruett Michael mabini that they want to dismantle the agency they make no bones about it they are shutting down enforcement cases in the pipeline pulling back lawyers and courts intimidating civil servants and violating their civil rights rolling back regulations and aborting any regulations that are under proposals under the Administrative Procedure Act okay so I asked the lawyers in Washington the public come up with remedies come up without global remedies for heaven's sake make sure you take a legal history course here on that global remedies if you have a network scores are their judicial mandates that can go up against Scott broad he's violating his oath of office now there is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion huge but there are limits to it aren't there if you have a police precinct chief who basically says I have limited number of police I can't go after all the street criminals and here my priorities that's okay they get away with that what if the police chief said I want to cut the number of police down and I know there's a corporate crime wave out there although I don't think it's very serious and I don't want to enforce the laws there would be legal action against that police chief we'll take the federal cop on the carpet crying Pete where are the remedies I don't know where the remedies are we're not talking about APA lawsuits filed by nrdc they're all under way arbitrary capricious standard we're talking about in personam punishment and removal short of impeachment which is another alternative officials can be impeached to earn in the presidency and we're waiting we're waiting for creative legal arguments under equitable law traditions maybe going back to India medieval England the two to go after these people you cannot believe how brazen yeah there's no hiding it they they've done it and the curve is gonna be more intensive in the next coming months because they're learning how to do it I'm not sure that counts as a solution nothing you know basically shutting down the CFPB in fact that he has stated I'm going to defang the CFPB and you've got a wall street crook saying whoa terrific Mike so he's admitted it now what are the boundaries the laws nothing if it isn't something that provides boundaries there has to be a boundary beyond prosecutorial discretion he's literally cutting a bunch of his budget requests for the first quarter zero isn't that actionable he's taking the federal cop off the corporate crime baby so can't we rely on law schools to come up with something a lot of professors I'm sure maybe we're not aware what's going on that's why we need a Consumer Law Center absolutely let me ask another question near and dear to the hearts of many in this room how do you suggest students with a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of student debt from law school and who need to pay it back find a career in Consumer Protection first you go to work for a corporate law firm and pay it off you've been inside the belly of the beast you'll be able to use that knowledge very usefully and now the question is you want to do what you really want to do and where the jobs we we organized our law school class of 1958 to start the Appleseed Foundation and they have opened 16 centers for law and justice in 16 states they probably have 50 jobs maybe 70 jobs just one law school class now what if all kinds of alumni classes from law schools around the country 40 years out 35 years off thinking about moving from success to significance do the similar thing they have an obligation to create positions for you they can't just tell you come on drop your corporate law cut jewels and start fighting for the people the other thing is through consumer Chekhov's when we established the citizen Utility Board statute in Wisconsin Illinois San Diego consumers opened their utility envelope and out fell a little part so do you want to join your own consumer group with your own lawyers and economists that said to fight the utilities when they try to gouge you deny service or whatever that created jobs she have the whole facility ideas is another word the third is you begin taxing the people the corporations who are using our common spring okay so you say why are you using our public lands wire you know you've mined for gold and you don't pay any royalties on the gold find on public lands why isn't there sales tax on Wall Street transactions you pay a ten percent sales tax here someone tomorrow buy is a hundred million dollars of Exxon Mobil derivatives zero sales tax you can have a sales tax which we staff years ago on Wall Street transactions and you reallocate the money you start taxing broadcasters for using the public Airways that way you fund public interest law jobs you fund audience networks I'm leaving some material on that I'm leaving a lot of material with Ted so you can elaborate some of these things that you've heard if you are interested a check offs there are all kinds of ways that legal minds can develop and advocate into the future to provide the funds that provide you with opportunities to work in public interest law my best guess is they're they're not more than a thousand Public Interest lawyers in the country and they don't necessarily all have to be local or progressive you know like public interest law firms there are some conservative ones and some more progressive ones and the distinction is that they're not funded by corporate money or and they're not legal aid legal aid corporation these are foundations private donations attorney fees type groups you've got more than a thousand pretty stuff going but look what they've achieved it's spectacular what they've achieved over the last 50 years and changing procedural rules environmental impact statements class action successes injunctions and a mice's we challenge stuff for example our public systems litigation would challenge the shutdown of the airbag rule by the Reagan administration it took it out Supreme Court 1:9 nothing to reinstall their battery as standard equipment it's because we had a non profit litigation group that could do that all right well Ralph I'm going to give you a choice here we have about five minutes left Ralph has to leave for a dinner engagement the berkeley law school is known among other things not simply for its new Consumer Law Center but also for its dedication to and leadership in the tech space so you have two questions where you can answer one either the auto industry has moved on to the latest driverless technology what are your thoughts on government regulations safety guidelines consumer rights etc or what are your thoughts on Bitcoin or cryptocurrency as a form of protection from the current corruption in banking well I know autonomous vehicles fully forget it you're not gonna see them you'll see semi autonomous like brakes already and some the problem with autonomous vehicles is there's no defense against hacking in fact one of the world's expert on hacking here in California whose clients include the Defense Department and NSA gave a speech at Carnegie Mellon in September as saying that the vulnerability of hacking is a weapon of mass destruction that they can hack like three million Toyota cop Toyota models of similar software and drive them off cliffs or into trees this guy knows what he's talking about I've been to technical conferences on autonomous fear the big hype they want to be appear modern thought trying to get press not to be left behind Silicon Valley companies auto mobile companies but they never discussed hacking because that's their Achilles heel there are the problems of autonomous vehicles there is an article you'll be interested in this Ted the Harvey Rosa field of consumer watchdog in Southern California has delivered at GW University Law School symposium last year on autonomous cars 35 page brief on the consumer and autonomous cars as far as Bitcoin I don't know anything about Bitcoin other than takes up a lot of electricity you can't know you can't know things about everything when you don't know something about it you admit it but I do know that it's enormous the power of electricity we are in addition a leading environmental law school so thank you for that observation the last question for your out and and this goes to most people in the room what is the best thing a new lawyer can do to make change plunge herself or himself in a legal emergency there's plenty around because that gives you structure immediacy urgency colleagues purposefulness minimum of and internecine struggle it's sort of like fighting a forest fire see the unity of purpose so get into an emergency situation the other thing I would urge is think structurally not just in terms of remedial treatment of individual cases of grief clients think structurally think justice prevention not just treatment and legal charity important as that is third enjoy yourself the pursuit of justice is a pursuit of joy it's a great way to live you look back you hold your head high you see this newspaper it's the Harvard Law Record recent edition I was editor of this Harvard law record without the Harvard Law Record spearheading big issues not Law Review footnote issues the law writ large the big policy issues the big questions the impertinent question the question is about why tort law focused on driver to driver combat and not automobile design or highway design without this paper I wouldn't be here today I'm gonna leave it with Ted two weeks ago I sent Harvard law students an open letter open letter to Harvard Law Students Palmer an alumnus who wish that I had an alumnus years ago who told me what I should have known then that I had to learn the hard way now so you might want to read it go to their website HL record org HL record org you get it all it's all online there should be a Berkeley law school newspaper how many would like to see it how can you have a law school without a newspaper you see you're then restricted to your specialized courses in your clinics but you can't unveil your wishes in your imagination and your proposals and how you see yourself for the next half century this is what a law school newspaper can do for you and the Bicentennial crisis by Pete Davis is summarized in that recent issue last fall as well you know the Dean of Harvard Law School there only been three major critiques of Harvard Law School in 30 years this is one of them I gave it you the Dean hasn't even responded I mean just one intellectual point of view never respond for intrepid law professors had a symposium with Pete Davis on February 7th at the law school and it was an act of courage and not wonderful what happens when you work for an institution for a simple declaration of truth becomes an act of courage see the self-censorship the conformity that operates between otherwise brilliant minds they have their own silo don't mess with my silo but don't fertilize between silos don't look at the big picture don't talk of Harvard Law School as a facilitator and concentrator of corporate power in the corporate state without appeared in the country completely contrary to its declared mission statement of a century ago so I'll leave these with you and I also want to leave this it's called getting steam to overcome corporatism this is for law students and others who have trouble getting indignant beyond ethnic racial and gender slurs I repeat beyond ethnic gender and racial slurs getting indignant that brutal reality brutal reality corporate style deaths injuries Quagmire's abroad climate disruption deep the oxidation of the ocean extinguishing of species suppression of labor they can't help themselves corporate power has to be subordinated to We the People constitutionally the brilliant work of corporate lawyers has ensured that even though the word corporation the word company and the word political party I never mentioned in our constitution we are ruled by them corporations must be our servants not our masters they are mutating they're innovating they are spreading their institutional tentacles everywhere look at the cover of the Nation magazine current issue so we have over a hundred excerpts of corporate abuses from The Wall Street Journal New York Times Washington Post other Marxist publications to get you steamed and if you read through in one setting and you don't have fire starting in your belly even though you have a lot in your mind absorbing these factual renditions you know what you've got a serious problem because without firing your belly your routine will not be disrupted your career vector will not be transformed and even though you know what's going on you will not take your conscience to work every day as you should and must and Ken and blazed the trail for the generations to come after you how many people would be in this room today if it wasn't for the law students in the 60s fighting for diversity if it was on law students in the 50s sending the professor's reeling backward who said we can't afford to let women in because they're taking up a valuable seat the Harvard Law School and we know when they graduate they're going to get married and have babies and not practice we're not going to waste seats at the Harvard Law School that's what we heard they stopped half the human race now you have to stand on our shoulders and you have the next generation standing on yours thank you thank you [Music] thank you [Applause]

Channel: Berkeley Center for Consumer Law and Economic Justice

Views: 7,277

Rating: 4.9096045 out of 5

Keywords: consumer law, berkeley law, ralph nader at berkeley, center for consumer law, economic justice, ralph, nader, ralph nader, berkeley law school, consumer protection, consumer advocacy and protection society, boalt hall, boalt, ted mermin, ted, mermin, caps, consumer law in the 21st century, law school, consumer law center

Id: OyVW9e9vC98

Length: 71min 34sec (4294 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 13 2018