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Monday, July 02, 2007

Courts - "Indiana lawyer tackles campaign-finance, election laws, winning 4 out of 5 challenges"

Maureen Groppe of the Indianapolis Star Washington Bureau has a long story today about Terre Haute attorney Jim Bopp. Some quotes:

WASHINGTON -- Not many attorneys get to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Terre Haute attorney James Bopp Jr. has done it five times and won four of them, including an election law challenge decided by the court last week.

"Four out of five, that's 80 percent," Bopp said. "It doesn't really get any better than that."

The court agreed with Bopp's client, Wisconsin Right to Life, that it could air ads mentioning lawmakers and financed by unknown donors shortly before an election. That's a major change to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, passed in 2002 to try to reduce the role of money in politics.

Bopp's one loss was the North Carolina Right to Life's unsuccessful argument that nonprofit organizations should be exempt from a ban on corporate contributions to federal candidates.

"He's a dynamo, one of the most tenacious lawyers I've ever seen," said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, who has been on the opposite side in some of Bopp's cases, including the latest one.

Hasen said Bopp has been successful in part because recent changes in the Supreme Court's composition have given his arguments a more receptive audience. But Bopp also "used every procedural tool at his disposal to force the court to address the issue," Hasen said.

In a profile of Bopp last year, the American Bar Association's journal called the 59-year-old "perhaps the most prominent lawyer in the country in campaign finance and election law, especially as the go-to guy for conservative religious groups wanting to work within the system, but work it for sure."

"He's kind of made the field for himself," Hasen said. "There wasn't anybody before Jim that was going around the country, trying to knock out every campaign finance law and judicial speech code he could find."

Bopp said of his strategy: "I think we do everything legally possible and ethically permitted to win."

There is much more to the story, including some mixed reviews.

Here is a long list of earlier ILB entries mentioning Mr. Bopp; here is the Nov. 3, 2006 ABA Journal entry.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on July 2, 2007 09:53 AM
Posted to Courts in general