From bad to worse

LITTLE ROCK — Fortune magazine reports that Miller County-that’s Texarkana-is a nationally known “class-action hellhole.”

Indeed, a bit of an odor wafts from the ArkLaTex all the way to the Justice Building in Little Rock, even Italy.

All I know to do is file this column for reference in 2018. That’s when Associate Justice Courtney Goodson of the Arkansas Supreme Court is up for re-election.

We can’t impeach her for being married to a wheeling-dealing attorney in Texarkana written up unfavorably in Fortune.

Nor can we impeach her for taking obscenely generous gifts from an occasional associate of her husband.

Both of those things are perfectly legal. So she gets to wear the robe and judge the rest of us.

I actually endorsed her candidacy in 2010, surmising that she’d be better than the West Memphis Three prosecutor who was her opponent. They tell me she’s actually a pretty competent judge.

But, as it says in Justice Goodson’s Judgepedia write-up: “In February2011, commentator John Brummett apologized to his readers for having endorsed her, indicating it was his second-worst-ever endorsement in Arkansas politics.”

Not only can I no longer remember the one worse,but I cannot now quite fathom it.

Here’s what Fortune reported: Lawyer Johnny Goodson of Texarkana, along with a few other practicing attorneys in town-and effectively aided by an agreeable judge-became known over the years for filing mammoth interstate class-action suits in local circuit court.

Then when defendants opposed the certification of the classes, the judge would defer that decision, maybe for years. In the meantime, the local plaintiffs’ lawyers hammered defendants with arduous and expensive requests for information, called “discovery.”

In time, defendants tended to settle for attorneys’ fees, often substantial, to get relieved of the expense and headache. Confidentiality agreements often keep awards to actual plaintiffs unknown.

Congress moved to stop this kind of practice in 2005. It enacted a law providing that interstate class-action suits seeking more than $5 million had to go to federal court.

But, according to Fortune, several such suits were filed in Miller County shortly before the law’s effective date, thus becoming grandfathered.

Now an insurance company, a defendant in one of the cases, has taken the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It seeks to have local edicts voided and federal jurisdiction declared.

In at least one case, or a part of it, Johnny Goodson’s co-counsel wasW.H. Taylor, a noted Fayetteville lawyer.

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So what does any of this have to do with Associate Justice Courtney Goodson?

Alas, I must repeat the background.

As a candidate for the Supreme Court in 2010, Courtney Goodson was Courtney Henry, wife of a lawyer in Fayetteville. In her campaign, she lined up the backing of Johnny Goodson, who is politically active (he’s a Mike Beebe appointee to the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees).

Lawyer Goodson helped facilitate candidate Courtney Henry’s bountiful fundraising among lawyers.

Shortly after she won the election, Justice-elect Henry split from her Fayetteville husband. In time, she married Johnny Goodson.

In between, disclosure laws for judges forced her to list around a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of gifts from Goodson.

Now that the two are married, he can give her what he wants without her having to itemize it for our perusal.

But it turns out that her latest required financial disclosure lists a $50,000 gift from Taylor, Goodson’s aforementioned co-counsel in part of a class-action case, for a trip to Italy.

That sounds like a boatload of pasta and olive oil.

Basically what you have is an Arkansas Supreme Court justice vacationing in Italy on a private lawyer’s fat tab and in the presence of her husband whose firm is a leading character in a Fortune magazine article about what the publication calls a “lurid, tragicomic, outlandish back story.”

It’s all a serious disservice to the vital appearances of judicial and legal independence.

I am loath to criticize Justice Goodson’s romantic leanings, especially so close to Valentine’s Day.

But, at the least, I would have preferred her to say, “Johnny, sweetie, this Supreme Court thing I’m doing is kind of important to me and to the appearance of propriety and justice in Arkansas. So I was just wondering, hon, if you thought we might pay our own part on this Italy trip. We have that much, don’t we, dear?”

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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.