Do you want your kids to smoke cigarettes or vape? If not, then tell them no. Don’t expect someone else to do it for you.
If you’re a parent, you have the rights and responsibilities that go with parenthood. The latter you can pass off or delegate at specific times to specific persons, but, ultimately, they’re still yours.
Will you cede your responsibilities to the school system? They’ll take them, if you do.
Same with plaintiff’s lawyers. They’ll agree to masquerade as holding your children accountable for you, too. That’s for a price.
Last March, Waxahachie Independent School District outside Dallas sought approval from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to hire a private law firm to sue Juul, a leading maker of e-cigarettes used for vaping and other manufacturers, distributors, and marketers of vaping and e-cigarette products. In October, Harris County followed suit, requesting the same.
Paxton denied their requests, and for good reason.
In recent years, private law firms have been pitching local units of government on letting them file various types of grand lawsuits in their names. The lawyers claim they will do so “for free,” agreeing to only be paid a percentage of what they can “win” for the local government.
These plaintiff’s lawyers know what isn’t immediately obvious to most: it’s one thing to sue on behalf of an average citizen, but it’s quite another to represent a government, which has state power at its disposal.
Lawyers suing on behalf of governments know that, no matter what the claim or alleged damages, they will be able to strike a settlement. That is-- the defendants will pay them to go away. And they will gladly take the payment.
It’s clear how this would benefit the lawyers. It’s unclear how it helps the people of Waxahachie or Harris County, most of whom have never noticed the “problem” and won’t notice the “solution” either.
We all want to claim our rights, but how many of us want to claim our duties? They go hand in hand, though, don’t they? We can’t have one without the other, and the duties are often challenging.
We all have rights as citizens, for instance, but we have duties, too. If we want to exercise one, we must exercise the other.
Counties and school districts have specific rights and duties. Lending out their state power and pursuing speculative legal actions to make private lawyers rich isn’t one of them. If they kept their focus on serving their citizens and their students, they might do their jobs better.