Melvin Watt: “Mr. Chairman, it is always great to come to the floor and engage in a debate with members of the Committee on the…”

“Mr. Chairman, it is always great to come to the floor and engage in a debate with members of the Committee on the Judiciary, because all of them were good lawyers before they came to Congress, so you know that they will try to build their case in the way that they would litigate a case if they were in court, and they will sometimes fudge the facts and obfuscate and do whatever is necessary to prove a point. We have had a lot of that happening already. The gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Goodlatte), of course, knows that one of the purposes for class action suits is that sometimes the amount that an individual member of the class would gain from that suit is so small that he or she cannot afford to litigate it without the benefit of putting that claim with other claims of other people who are similarly situated, so the gentleman has done a great job of making it appear that the lawyers in the cases got disproportionate amounts of money to the members of the class.”