How Mass Dismissal of Covid-Era Civil Cases Undermines Americans’ Most Fundamental Right: John Beau

In 2020, the year society was locked down and basic constitutional rights of the entire US population were discarded, civil cases increased by more than 60%. In that year alone, there was an excess of lawsuits compared to prior years of over 180,000 cases.

John Beaudoin told me: “Did they hire 62% more people to handle those cases? No. Did everybody in the court system, all the judges and all the clerks, work 62 % more hours? Like 14 hours a day, every day for a year? No. There’s only one way to do this: Dismiss, dismiss, dismiss.”

And that is what happened: mass dismissals of civil lawsuits based on the standing doctrine. To have standing, the plaintiffs must prove harm from the action or conduct they’re challenging. And one would think that this should be easy. It is anything but.

Beaudoin points to two rather recent landmark Supreme Court Cases that drastically raised the bar for plaintiffs to have sufficient standing so that their case would survive a motion to dismiss: Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal (2009).

According to Beaudoin, “Legal doctrines like Twombly and Iqbal let judges dismiss nearly any case if it’s deemed implausible or lacking facts, no matter the injustice.”

To get an idea how often SCOTUS referred to Twombly and Iqbal to dismiss cases, he gathered the numbers of case citations for all cases decided by the Supreme Court: “I gleaned these from Google Scholar. I’ve since checked it out at Westlaw. And although the numbers are different, they’re proportional. So the graph would look exactly the same, but the bottom numbers would be like 380,000 instead of 300,000. But the others would go up, too, proportionally. So Westlaw is counting differently than Google Scholar.”

Astonishingly, Twombly and Iqbal are the most quoted cases with almost 300,000 citations each. Despite the fact that these cases have only been around for about 16 years.

According to Beaudoin, both Twombly and iqbal “were used before COVID, but since COVID came, the courts use these two cases to blow everything out of the water.”

And he continued: “I can prove that many of these cases were unrighteously dismissed, or I can prove that they used dismissal doctrines in the court and civil procedure to never hear the substance of these cases.”

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution lists the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. That right, says Beaudoin, is the most foundational right for citizens to uphold and protect their other core rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

But what’s the value of a theoretical right to petition for a redress of grievances, if it’s near to impossible to get standing, i.e. to have the court acknowledge that grievances did in fact happen to the plaintiff?

“If we can’t get resolution in the courts, there’s nowhere else to go. And the courts refuse to do their jobs,” he says.

The question then is what happens to a society where the courts are not doing their job of dispute resolution. Where courts dismiss citizens’ cases for even the most serious breaches of fundamental constitutional rights.

Beaudoin is convinced that as a consequence civil society starts breaking down: “You have people dividing into camps because the issues are not being settled or adjudicated. And so you leave it to society to fight amongst each other, fight on social media, fight in the streets. We’re devolving as a civil society based on what’s happened with these two cases and the way the courts are operating, extremely inefficiently dismissing righteous cases that should be heard.”

But societal breakdown is not inevitable, he emphasizes, because the underlying cause is fixable: “What is the root cause where, if you change something, you can fix the whole system? One of the things that you can fix is standing doctrine and that would fix a lot in the United States.”

And who should fix it? “John Roberts came in in 2005 as Chief Justice. Those cases I just showed you were two years after he got there and four years after he got there. He broke it. His court broke the system, so he’s got to fix it. Or the United States will devolve into civil war.”

CHAPTERS
0:00:00 Introduction and Overview of Graph Data
0:00:50 Explanation of Yearly Data Variation
0:01:09 Highlighting Significant Data Points
0:13:09 Standing Doctrine
0:13:32 Further Analysis of Legal Standing and Case Dismissals
0:14:29 Critique of Judicial System and Focus on Courts
0:18:40 Why The PREP Act Is Unconstitutional
0:20:00 Beaudoin’s Petition to the Supreme Court
0:22:19 Root Cause Analysis and Call for Judicial Reform

RESOURCES
Beaudoin’s Substack: The Real CdC’s Newsletter
https://therealcdc.substack.com/