Class-action Communism.

There was a time when the legal profession teemed with defenders of individual liberty.

No seriously -- it did.

In his 1789 History of the American Revolution, David Ramsay recorded that of the delegates to the 1774 Continental Congress, "one half were lawyers. Gentlemen of that profession had acquired the confidence of the inhabitants by their exertions in the common cause." Perhaps Ramsay's point was that only by such exertions could lawyers overcome the suspicions of the other colonists. In any case, it's difficult to argue with the proposition that John Adams and Patrick Henry are worthier exemplars of the legal profession than Alan Dershowitz.

Artful digs at the legal profession abound in Shakespeare's works, the most famous of which is: "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." This classic "lawyer joke" was uttered by "Dick the Butcher," a murderous henchman of Jack Cade, a petty criminal-turned-revolutionary. Cade and what Shakespeare called his "rabblement" were depicted as sort of a 15th century Khmer Rouge, giddily murdering anybody who impeded their path to total power. They justified their crimes by invoking the utopia they intended to build -- why, according to Cade, once he was installed as ruler, all things would be had "in common," and the city's sewers would "run nothing but claret wine"!

Obviously, those who were the custodians of the law would have to be annihilated in order to bring about Cade's envisioned Communist utopia. This didn't mean, however, that the profession of "lawyer" would be done away with; it would simply be redefined. In one scene Cade presides over a mockery of a trial before killing one of his victims, so as to make it "legal." Shakespeare thus foreshadowed the show trials carried out by Communist butchers like Josef Stalin, who never lacked for lawyers willing to help build the total state.

Where Stalin used show trials, some modern totalitarians make use of class-action lawsuits and extorted settlements -- the most significant example being the $246 billion settlement between the tobacco industry and 41 state governments. While lucrative settlements of ludicrous class-action suits are common, the tobacco settlement pioneered what could be called taxation by litigation. Settlement funds were disbursed to participating states to fund social programs. In addition, a large chunk of the settlement haul -- nearly $12 million -- found its way into the coffers of the Democratic Party, as trial lawyers enriched by the deal paid off political co-conspirators in the extortion scheme.

In his book Between the Alps and a Hard Place, professor Angelo Codevilla of Boston University describes how a squalid coalition used the tactics of class-action Communism to tax the citizens of Switzerland in order to enrich the Democratic Party and some of its key political allies. Thanks to a four-year propaganda campaign "orchestrated by the Clinton administration in conjunction with Edgar Bronfman, billionaire owner of a liquor and media empire," World War II-era Switzerland was smeared as a Nazi ally, and its banks were accused of stealing the assets of Holocaust victims and survivors.

Codevilla describes how Clinton administration officials colluded with partisan Democrats in New York City -- particularly City Comptroller Alan Hevesi -- to blackmail the Swiss into accepting a settlement. Hevesi's leverage was his ability to deny an operating license for a proposed merger of two of Switzerland's largest banks; if the merger had been denied, the banks stood to lose $4 billion a year in profits.

The resulting political pressure induced the Swiss government to agree to a $1.25 billion settlement -- to be underwritten by that country's taxpayers -- despite the fact that not a molecule of evidence was produced to justify the charges against Switzerland. What the Clintonites and their comrades did to Switzerland, writes Codevilla, "amounted to extending abroad the American interest-group process, by which government officials purchase the support of some citizens by renting to them the power to impose costs on others."

From collecting a settlement for injuries that didn't happen, it's not a big leap to seek damages for injuries yet to happen -- or that may not occur at all. This is the perverse vision of a group of litigators representing various eco-Communist groups (Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, et al.) who are threatening to file suit, perhaps before a UN court, on behalf of "people or whole countries that have suffered adverse effects of global warming," in the words of the September 6th New York Times.

The Times notes that the envisioned "global warming" suits were inspired "by broad-based class-action lawsuits like those filed on behalf of Holocaust survivors and against tobacco companies...." One potential plaintiff is Tuvalu, an island that "could vanish" in 50 years because of rising sea levels caused by "global warming." Of course, this scenario is, in its way, just as fanciful as the magical wine-running sewers described by Jack Cade.

According to Professor Andrew Strauss of Widener University Law School, the proposed "global warming" lawsuits typify "the legalization of international relations." Maybe Dick the Butcher had a point....