Legal News

Was the Franken/Coleman Election ?Effectively Stolen??

By Ashby Jones

Tuesday afternoon, in response to our post about Richard Posner and copyright law, a reader writing under the name “old school” wrote the following comment:

OK, Ashby, restrain yourself - I know you didn't blog about the Franken /Elias victory train and probably are just DYIN' ta, but please. BLT has already trumpeted the Perkins Coie lawyer's horn. And frankly (no pun intended), I'm just glad it's over - and the lawyer who happened to win isn't some brilliant legal genius or anything, just a guy with a good case and good facts. (Yeesh.) So Puleese, no long "whataguy" story tomorrow, or whenever, when you realize this is something you're justg DYIN' to blog about. Just sayin'.

The comment made us laugh out loud (really, it did), partly because “old school” pretty deftly channeled the way we approach what we write about (Big case? Who are the lawyers? What have others written), and partly because we’ve never had someone plead with us in the comments section of a post not to write about something totally unrelated. In any event, with apologies to “old school,” we’re going to do a little roundup on the Franken/Coleman story, which effectively ended on Tuesday when the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that lower courts hadn’t violated the law in making rulings that favored Franken during the recount process. Click here for the opinion.

The Lawyers: We don’t know if he’s a “brilliant legal genius,” but Perkins Coie’s Marc Elias (Hamilton College, Duke Law) did win the case for his client, Al Franken. The win represents another nice feather in Perkins’s D.C. office; another client of the office, Barack Obama, happened to win a recent election as well. On the losing end: Joseph Friedberg, a long-time heavyweight Twin Cities litigator. For good measure, here’s the BLT post on Elias, from Tuesday.

The Opinions: For two different takes on the ruling, check out commentary by the WSJ’s editorial staff, which called the, the election “effectively stolen.” A different take comes from Politico, says Coleman lost partly because of the clarity of Minnesota’s election law: “Minnesota election law was remarkably clear in spelling out the procedures for a recount in reviewing ballots to be considered and accepted.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).