Sheila Jackson Lee: “Reading again from the Judicial Conference letter, it says: The facts do not support any assumption that mandatory…”

“Reading again from the Judicial Conference letter, it says: The facts do not support any assumption that mandatory sanctions under H.R. 720--that is what the bill is about--deter frivolous filings. All it does, after a decade of experience, is that it demonstrates that it failed to provide meaningful relief from the litigation behavior it was supposed to address. What it will do is it will punish the small business. By eliminating the mandatory fee-shifting provision, the 1993 rule discouraged satellite litigation. Reinstating this mandatory fee-shifting rule, as H.R. 720 does, will again have a chilling effect. The Jackson Lee amendment would give the courts discretion to protect against the mom-and-pop business from having to pay because they mistakenly thought big bank XYZ did them in, and it really was a mistake on their part. Sanctions are more often imposed against plaintiffs than defendants, more often imposed against plaintiffs in certain kind of cases, primarily civil rights and certain kinds of discrimination cases. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka might have been perceived to be outrageous--how dare you try to strike down the separate but equal--and yet it has had an amazing impact and a case of moment in history. Or the Loving v. Virginia, when two individuals who loved each other still were kept out of Virginia because they were of different races, it was absurd to file that lawsuit at that time.…”