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My friend Ted Frank has this great profile about him in WSJ. Ted has taken an interesting approach to challenging class actions settlements that screw over plaintiffs and give bounties to plaintiff lawyers.

There are two types of class-action lawyers: those who bring the big lawsuits against corporate America, and those who defend them.

And then there’s Ted Frank.

Mr. Frank is a relative newcomer to the burgeoning world of class-action objectors. Objectors are lawyers who swoop in at the 11th hour and make formal objections to settlements hammered out between corporate defendants and “classes” of individuals who have alleged that a company has defrauded its investors or created a product that injured consumers.

Many objectors’ aims are simple. They want to get more money for a small subset of the class unhappy with a settlement’s proposed terms. So they’ll typically drop their complaints if the lead class attorneys agree to cut them—and their clients—a bigger slice of the settlement.

Not Mr. Frank, who has emerged as a rare breed in the world of class-action objectors because he tends to stay and fight settlements to the end, rather than cut quick deals. His stated mission is different, too. He says it’s to right the wrongs of the class-action system by upending settlements that he thinks give class members too little and give the plaintiffs’ lawyers too much.

But what is Ted’s motivation?

Mr. Frank considers that case his most significant win largely because the Ninth Circuit issued a lengthy opinion that will serve as “precedent” that lower courts in the western U.S will have to follow. “This is why we’re doing this,” he said. “To generate opinions that have leverage beyond individual cases.”

In other words, Mr. Frank says he is trying to change the law through his lawyering.

Some supporters think he’s doing just that: effectively serving as a watch-dog over the class-action system, a role that Congress and the courts have for too long neglected.

“The fact is that he’s been able to persuade courts to finally look seriously at issues that they used to completely ignore,” said Lester Brickman, an expert on class-action litigation and a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

Others are less supportive. “I’m not sure anyone really believes he’s in it for the reason he states—that he cares about consumers,” said James Sabella, a plaintiffs’ lawyer currently defending the Sirius XM settlement over Mr. Frank’s objections. “He wants class actions to go away entirely.”

But without class actions, said Mr. Sabella, corporate America will get a “free pass on a lot of questionable behavior.”

You may recall that Ted Frank bet on Walmart’s stock going up following the decision in Wal-mart v. Dukes and coined Ted Frank’s law–don’t name any law ater a victim.

Somehow this article in the Times, which talks about landlords in East Harlem who let apartments go vacant rather than rent them, does not mention the cost of renting under rent-contro until page 2!

Mr. James, the architect, took a reporter on a walk between 106th and 116th Streets and between Lexington and Third Avenues and pointed out 20 boarded-up residential buildings with active storefronts. At 152 East 110th Street, a four-story building was abandoned except for a Dolce Vita pizzeria. A five-story corner building at 1773 Lexington Avenue had a busy grocery and a shuttered restaurant, but the apartments above had long been vacant. The two buildings to the south had Chinese and Mexican restaurants and a nail salon, but the apartments above were also empty.

“My best guess is they don’t want the hassle of renting to tenants,” he said, pointing out that tenants protected by rent-stabilization laws could be difficult to evict.

It’s better than landlords who torch their buildings rather than go rent-control.

The last entry of Stoker’s journal in 1881 hints at a major character he would use in “Dracula.” In the novel, Renfield is an asylum inmate who has delusions that compel him to eat living beings, including flies, to gain their life force. The vampire Count Dracula seizes on Renfield’s weakness and offers him as many creatures as he can eat in exchange for his eternal devotion.

It doesn’t work out well for Renfield in the end.

In his journal, Stoker wrote: “I once knew a boy who put so many flies into a bottle that they had not room to die.”

In another passage, the author seems to be alluding to a vampire’s inability to see his own reflection. “Story of man who reflects everybody’s self who meets him,” he wrote.

Stoker’s interest in spookiness shows up in other journal entries.

“A man builds up his shadow on a wall bit by bit by adding to substance,” he wrote. “Suddenly the shadow becomes alive.” The passage is believed to be a kernel of the “The Shadow Builder,” one of Stoker’s first attempts at a horror mystery.

This is like when J.K. Rowling said Dumbledore was gay after the final book had been written. I don’t like legislative history! Let’s read the book by itself. Though, this is slightly better. Rather than incorporating statements of disparate legislators, this is solely the private thoughts of Stoker. Also, since the journal was private–and he likely never intended it for mass consumption–he wrote it for himself, and not the public. This increases its reliability.

The story is here.

My previous post, and comparison to the Speluncean Explorers is here.

An interesting piece about the tragedy that is Buck v. Bell, and Justice Holmes.

In this article written for a law-review symposium in response to a presentation on the infamous 1927 U.S. Supreme Court opinion in Buck v. Bell, Edward J. Larson argues that, at the time that the case was decided, eugenics was on the incline, not the decline. In the 1920s, the American scientific and medical community broadly backed eugenic remedies for various forms of mental illness and retardation. Legislatures, lawyers, and jurists took their cue from this scientific and medical consensus. Absent any question that the statute at issue in Buck v. Bell was validly passed by the Virginia legislature or that due process was provided for the persons subject to its reach, the law should have withstood constitutional challenge. The tragedy of Buck v. Bell, Larson argues, was that Carrie Buck never received the due process guaranteed under Virginia’s eugenic sterilization statute and that neither her lawyers nor the courts protected her from a flagrant violation of her basic constitutional and statutory rights. Under the fact that should have been brought out at trial, Carrie Buck would not have been sterilized. More fundamentally, had due process been provided in this and other instances, while eugenics would still have been a scientific and medical mistake, it would not be a legal one.

Did you know that Carrie Buck was raped? That is why she got pregnant? Did you know she was an honor student? No that didn’t make it into the opinion. The only social darwinist on the court was Holmes.

This is what happens when the courts defer blindly to the state’s version of the case, without providing any scrutiny.  I wonder what Oliver Wendell Breyer would think?