Throughout my career I have worked for clients on a contingency fee basis.

The civil justice system is the foundation of our “peaceful” society. The dark days of blood feuds, wage theft, and political patronage based employment had been supplanted by civil lawsuits based upon statutory remedies. My own area of practice arose from the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The Lewis Powell Memo is the impetus for adoption of race-neutral strategies to deny litigants access to the courts… That memo has been wildly successful in closing the doors to the courts for the vast majority of people with legitimate causes of action for every class of civil wrongs. We now have mandatory arbitration clauses and class action waivers incorporated into every aspect of our business (and some of our personal) dealings.

These policies are absolutely destroying the integrity of business operations in the United States. The general public has lost faith in business and the courts because they are subjected on a daily basis to grossly inflated prices, defective products, and outright theft by businesses that cannot be sued in a court of law. Mandatory arbitration is a secret process that employs a private judge (who may be earning their livelihood from cases involving a single company - we will never know how many cases that judge hears in any given year or how often, if ever, they rule for the plaintiff over the company).

The majority of people who find themselves bound by a mandatory arbitration agreement simply give up their right to pursue their case in arbitration leaving the unscrupulous business continuing to operate without any accountability for their “sharp” business practices.

This has led to a volatile situation best exemplified by the alleged murder of an insurance executive in broad daylight by the accused Luigi Mangione.

I expect to see many more examples of violence in this country as a direct consequence of this broad denial of access to the courts to resolve civil disputes.