32
votes
Young Donald Trump appointed US judge declares centuries old qui tam case practice unconstitutional
Link information
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- Title
- Trump Judge Proves Again That She's One Of America's Least Qualified Jurists
- Authors
- Joe Patrice, Gaston Kroub, Staci Zaretsky, Above the Law, Chris Williams, Kathryn Rubino
- Published
- Oct 1 2024
- Word count
- 1981 words
So, is this a ground work for removing whistleblower protection then? I mean, it involves American Republicans so I can only assume the worst.
That would be my guess. Remove it rather than updating it with a new law as other countries have done. Anything that makes whistleblowing harder is probably a bad thing.
So, if I've understood your title properly, a young judge who Trump appointed has declared something unconstitutional even though it's been in active use for 160 years?
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According to Wikipedia this has been constitutionally challenged in the past. And also only exists in the US and nowhere else. But it's being discussed because the judge is young and was appointed by a politician we don't like, supposedly with partisan goals.....?
Sorry to go against the hive-mind here, but I respect this young judge for making a judicial decision challenging the status quo, whether or not it was a good interpretation. It takes guts to go against the grain in the legal system. In my opinion "precedent" is an incredibly unstable way to standardize a process/system and the age of a legal interpretation is a minor consideration at best. If Congress really wants something, they should make it into an explicit law.
I don't have legal knowledge. I am not an attorney and I dislike the use of Latin in the judicial system. However, this does not seem like an enormously significant practice to me. You can still be a whistleblower without being a plaintiff/receiving settlements. The federal government can still sue of its own accord. Under what circumstances would the federal government be the unknowing victim of fraud, then figure that out through a media whistleblower report, and then not investigate it or sue??? In terms of "just deserts" being doled out, this seems like a non-issue.
The benefit of qui tam seems to be that it encourages whistleblowing by entitling whistleblowers to some financial settlements, but in our modern age people leak things all the time for any reason, often for free. I don't know if this "160-year-old" practice is that important anymore, even if it is kind of neat.
The article does address your point:
In short, it's not generally the role of trial judges to question whether a long-standing law is constitutional. Trial judges are meant to interpret matters of fact and then apply the law as written. If there are novel questions about the underlying theory of law, those matters can be handled in the appeals courts. Indeed, this is pretty much exclusively what appeals courts do -- normally they will not revisit the matters of fact determined at the trial court level unless the judge made a grave error.
To do otherwise would invite a single person to rewrite the law from whole cloth, as happened here.
Well, from the wikipedia page, it appears the reason it's not used other places is because they have a specific statute in place to enable the same result.
I don't know enough about the law to know if it's the same, but a great many environmental protection gains have come through citizen suit actions which are similar in principle.
IANAL but I believe this is because Latin is a "dead" language that isn't in use anymore, so it doesn't evolve. This is great for the legal system where you don't want future generations to misinterpret a passage because English changed over the decades.
Even if you are correct and society would be better if this practice were eliminated, the article raised doubts whether this judge had enough legal experience in the current system to be a competent judge. A bad judge can do a lot of harm that won't necessarily get rectified. Many people can't afford appeals.
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OK. fair enough. There's a reason I don't work in law.
If it's possible for someone truly incompetent (not necessarily malicious, just inexperienced) enough to ruin people's lives, there should be a stronger vetting process. Like a legal statute requiring a minimum age or number of years served. Or a law passed by Congress barring trial judges from making excessive comments on constitutionality? Or any number or other things beyond "the president liked this judge."
The article points out what is apparently a major problem but doesn't have a solution. It just insults the judge. That is not useful.
This judge is appointed to the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida. I cannot find a single statue requiring any amount of experience to be appointed to this position, other than having passed the bar exam. It seems completely pointless to complain about bad judges being appointed when it's only possible because there are no rules, just incredibly subjective best practices about a judge's temperament and character.
On the other hand, complaining when the system we have goes badly wrong, might motivate people to advocate for improvements.
Our current system evolved over time and was influenced by idealists, by corrupt people, by authoritarians and by people who were looking to build an efficient system that could be applied at scale in a consistent predictable way.
It reminds me a little bit of how the physical structure of the human body is evidence for evolution rather than design. In our political and judicial system, Things work, and arbitrary changes might make things worse, but what we have is clearly not perfect and reflects the priorities of people hundreds of years ago. However changing it is not easy and making change easier risks sabotage from influential bad actors.
Anyway I thought the decision was news worthy.
I think, ultimately, no matter what vetting processes you have in place, it's still possible for a motivated group of people to undermine them. The important thing here is to reflect on whether we want to elect someone who ignores social norms that, as it turns out, appear to be quite important (appointing experienced, conscientious people to judicial positions).
what is qui tam