Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released a list of cases Sunday, giving reporters and voters the first peek they’ve ever had into her career consulting with mass torts and class action litigants in the years during and following her tenure at Harvard Law — and at least one case is raising eyebrows among those who value Warren’s anti-corporate stance.
SFGate has unearthed a memo from Warren, written on Harvard Law School letterhead and compiled sometime in the late 1990s, gives a glimpse into the world Warren operated in before becoming an anti-corporate and anti-Wall Street crusader. In it, Warren defends the interests of corporate America against some of the very people she now claims to represent: a host of people affected by corporate unwillingness to abide by basic environmental regulations.
“Warren was not arguing on behalf of vulnerable families, nor was she offering the sort of stinging rebuke of corporate greed that would later define her political career,” SFGate reports. “Rather, Warren was representing a large development company that was trying to avoid having to clean up a toxic waste site.”
The memo is particularly cold and focuses largely on corporate profits — a document the current Sen. Warren would likely use to demonize any number of CEOs. In it, she argues that the corporation in question should do whatever possible to avoid litigation on environmental matters in order to “maximize its returns to its unpaid creditors and to survive as an employer.”
“Environmental claims, product liability claims, and mass tort claims, for which we have currently only seen the tip of the iceberg, are multiplying against American businesses,” Warren wrote, adding that it would behoove her client to find another company to blame the anticipated problems on so that they don’t have to shoulder any cleanup costs.
Warren would probably argue that she was just doing her job as a high-profile legal consultant, but faculty at Harvard Law School likely have their pick of cases. She didn’t necessarily have to argue on behalf of corporations trying to avoid mass tort and class action litigation if she didn’t want to.
SFGate says they are the first to unearth the memo, and were able to locate the document because Warren’s campaign released information about her early work as a litigation consultant on Sunday. According to that trove of information, Warren earned around $2 million as a litigation consultant and worked for a variety of clients.
The list, however, is suspected to be incomplete. Warren’s campaign released the list after a week of pressure from South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, after she accused Buttigieg of “hiding” the names of his fundraisers. Buttigieg, sensing an opportunity to hit back at one of his top competitors in the all-important Iowa primary, demanded that Warren release years of tax documents. She demurred but, after searching through both public and private records, was able to compile a roster.
Both the Washington Post and Politico, which reported on the matter Monday, said they were not able to independently verify the clients.