In these and other cases, the left has repeatedly been taking it on the chin in courts across the land.

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Something is always boiling in the legal world. Sometimes so much boils at once that some worthy cases and stories don’t get the attention they deserve. Such is the situation in the past few weeks, with several cases about which I’ve written right here at CFIF, or thematically related to those cases, all seeing important developments in not much more than a fortnight.

The good news is, most of those cases seem to be breaking in favor of the side of right reason and of constitutionalism properly understood.

Herewith, then, a brief rundown of the good legal news.

Chevron/Ecuador: In this utterly bogus environmental case pushed by Ecuador’s radical, left-wing government, in conjunction with some greedy and apparently unethical American plaintiffs’ lawyers, Chevron stands condemned to an $19 billion penalty for alleged ecological damage to the rain forests. Bah, humbug. 

New developments: First, a court in Ontario rejected Ecuador’s enforcement action. Second, a consultant for the plaintiffs’ lawyer admitted to “misattribution of authorship” of a key report allegedly documenting the plaintiffs’ claims, and noted that the evidence of environmental harm he did see came from Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, not from Chevron’s predecessor, Texaco. Third, litigation finance firm Buford Capital withdrew from the case because of growing evidence indicating fraud by the plaintiffs’ lawyers in “extorting some payment out of Chevron.”

In short, Chevron continues its record of winning judgments worldwide in its efforts to clear its name.

Representative Allen West’s re-election bid: The heroic organization True the Vote, dedicated to battling against vote fraud, won a sweeping and unprecedented settlement this week, allowing it to review a wide variety of evidence with regard to voting and registration discrepancies related to the officially failed re-election bid of conservative U.S. Representative Allen West. West long ago gave up his official challenge to the results, even though there already was plenty of evidence of dodgy practices by elections officials. As a result of True the Vote’s work, though, the system might just have a chance to be cleaned up for the next election.

Equal enforcement of voting laws: After years of watching the Obama/Holder/Perez Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department refuse to enforce voting rights laws against non-white perpetrators and in favor of clean voter rolls, top lawyers J. Christian Adams and Christopher Coates have filed suit against two Mississippi counties to force them to comply with the vote-integrity parts of the National Voter Registration Act.

Significantly, the two lawyers are representing a prestigious group, the American Civil Rights Union, whose directors and staff include luminaries such as former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, former Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell and economics professor/columnist Walter Williams. These counties already have quite a history of fraud. And now even their clerks admit they fail to scrub their rolls, despite laws directing them otherwise, specifically because of pressure from left-wing groups.

Drakes Bay Oyster Case: In this example of the absurdity of Obamite/lefty-environmentalist crusades, I reported that the Department of Interior is trying to shut down an oyster farm that actually helps the ecology of the California coast while helping provide plenty of jobs and food for Californians. Now comes respected scientist Dr. Corey Goodman to report a series of tests showing that all of Interior’s claimed data is wrong, from top to bottom. As this case moves towards appeal, Dr. Goodman’s evidence will surely aid the arguments of the Drakes Bay Oyster Company – arguments supported even by liberal Senator Dianne Feinstein, who is fighting hard against Interior’s reign of error.

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In these and other cases, the left has repeatedly been taking it on the chin in courts across the land. For instance, in the multiple legal battles against the HHS mandate requiring insurance coverage for abortion-inducing drugs, the administration has lost far more intermediate rulings than it has won – with the score in suits by for-profit companies so far being 19-6 in favor of challengers, against the Obama administration.

The United States, thank goodness, has been carefully designed to promote the rule of law over the will of individual men. So far, the Madisonian design is holding, even if sometimes only by its fingernails.