Outsourcing the attorney general's job undermines justice
State attorneys general across the U.S. are outsourcing their public duties on behalf of taxpayers to private law firms, diminishing the recovery of damages owed to victims and driving up the costs of our legal system. It is an abuse of the justice system by those sworn to uphold it. It must stop.
This abuse is no longer limited to lawsuits for monetary damages. Recently, in my home state of Colorado, Attorney General Phil Weiser — a career stranger to the courtroom — recently bypassed the army of taxpayer-funded attorneys in his office to handle a high-profile case involving allegations of manslaughter by police and paramedics.
Despite being appointed by name by Gov. Jared Polis, he instead appointed two partners from civil law firms in Chicago and Los Angeles to handle the prosecution, despite the fact that neither of the civil lawyers was licensed in Colorado, nor had either of them ever been state prosecutors. After weeks of an inexplicably expensive prosecution case and no defense offered by the officers, the jury did not convict on any of the hand-picked lead charges.
Mr. Weiser has yet to explain why experienced Colorado attorneys already employed by Colorado taxpayers were unfit to handle the prosecution of Colorado police officers in front of Coloradans in Colorado courts for allegedly violating Colorado laws. How does outsourcing to well-intentioned but lightly experienced attorneys advance justice?
Unfortunately, such arrangements have become increasingly common — not just in Colorado, but all over the country. Some local and state governments, as well as attorneys general, have enlisted private, contingency-fee lawyers to represent their states in court. This creates two fundamental problems.
First, in these instances, the prosecutorial power of the state risks being appropriated for political motives. Second, it reduces the legal system to a “pay for results” scheme, in which the outcome is driven more by the attorneys’ profit motive than by the pursuit of justice.
The most prominent example is the rash of climate lawsuits cropping up around the country. Law firms operating on a contingency basis — the same pay basis employed by personal injury lawyers — have enlisted nearly two dozen local governments — including the city of Boulder and counties of San Miguel and Boulder in Colorado — to sue energy producers on public nuisance grounds for their purported contribution to climate change.