Successful Bivins Actions

[Gregg]

Al Hodges, the crazy lawyer suing the SEC comminsioners past and present for $3,87 Trillion dollars has made the claim that he has won 3 or 4 Bivens Actions in the past (Al makes a lof of his claims through associates and third parties, I have not seen him make any actual claim himself). I was under the impression that a Bivens Action is a hail mary kind of play and that very few of them have actually been won anywhere, more less 3 or 4 by a single attorney whose practice is mostly lemon law prosecutions and what I call ambulance chasing liability cases. From all I can find it's actually pretty rare for any case he files to even make it to trial.

Anyhow, anyone with access to California legal records and such care to do a little research for me on this clown.

A. Clifton Hodges (CSBN 046803)
HODGES AND ASSOCIATES
4 East Holly Street, Suite 202
Pasadena, CA 91103-3900
Tel: (626) 564-9797
Fax: (626) 564-9111
E-Mail: al@hodgesandassociates.com

The case is

CV-01-03894-RSWL (SHx)

He also represents Micheal Cotrell, BS,MA in his Leo Wanta garbage.....

[fortinbras]

I have heard of only a few successful Bivens lawsuits.

One fact much ignored is that the courts say that a Bivens action is not possible against IRS employees ... not because they are either flawless or immune to liability but because there is already a specific tax law that provides for lawsuits arising from the misconduct of IRS employees and therefore a Bivens remedy is not an option.

[ASITStands]

SRN has an article with a link to a paper by Alex Reinert, Measuring the Success of Bivens Litigation and its Consequences for the Individual Liability Model, September 22, 2009.

In answer to your question, the abstract reads in part (bolding added):

Commentators base their criticism of the individual liability model on two empirical assumptions: (1) Bivens suits are almost never successful; and (2) the defense of qualified immunity, available only to individuals, is a nearly insuperable barrier to plaintiffs’ prevailing in Bivens claims. ... This Article corrects that oversight by offering the results of the first detailed empirical study of the determinants and outcomes of Bivens litigation. Based on data collected from cases filed in five district courts from 2001-2003, this Article concludes that the truths that scholars and judges have taken as a given are unsupported. Bivens claims succeed at a much higher rate than previously thought, especially compared to other civil rights litigation, and the defense of qualified immunity rarely plays a role in the outcome of Bivens litigation.

"Bivens claims succeed at a much higher rate than previously thought."

The Introduction includes the following statement (bolding added):

This Article represents the first attempt to systematically study the success
of Bivens litigation, and its results challenge longstanding assumptions about
the outcomes of these claims. After conducting a detailed study of case dockets
over three years in five district courts, I conclude here that Bivens cases are
much more successful than has been assumed by the legal community, and that
in some respects they are nearly as successful as other kinds of challenges to
governmental misconduct. Depending on the procedural posture, presence of
counsel, and type of case, success rates for Bivens suits range from 16% to
more than 40%, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than has
previously been estimated.

"... much more successful than has been assumed by the legal community"

The tables are interesting but give no explicit names of cases litigated or successful.

[notorial dissent]

So for all the blather, the article is still basically nothing but unsupported supposition with no facts to back it up.

[Judge Roy Bean]

So for all the blather, the article is still basically nothing but unsupported supposition with no facts to back it up.

I wouldn't discount something from Reinert that quickly.

As to Hodges' claims, I have no idea.

[notorial dissent]

I'm not discounting anything, just saying that if they didn't give any useful information, like cites, in the article to actual cases, it is just so much wasted news print. I would have thought that if they had found all these heretofore unknown cases that they would have been pointing them out instead of alluding to them being "much more successful than has been assumed by the legal community" and that "in some respects they are nearly as successful as other kinds of challenges to governmental misconduct" without anything more than their word on it, that isn't much to go on. I don't see any cites, and I don't see any statistics with anything to back them up, so I until I do, they get no more credence than our own resident gas passer.

If this is an example of their professional writing then color me unimpressed.

[Burzmali]

IANAL, but the linked article has tables of court cases with docket numbers...

[ASITStands]

IANAL, but the linked article has tables of court cases with docket numbers...

So it does! Sorry I had missed that detail.

Go to page 48 [853] of the SSRN PDF, and you'll see Appendix Table 1, Raw Data, which gives the District, Date Filed and Docket, Disposition and certain other interesting facts.

I didn't post the links or text to make an argument but to provide a starting point.

I Ain't a Lawyer either. Thanks, Burzmaili You read closer than I.