The Courts Get One Right

In what has to be one of the soundest decisions from the judicial system in recent months, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that descendents of slaves do not deserve reparations from U.S. companies, including banks, insurers, and transportation firms. This case should have been dismissed in its infancy on the lack of merit alone, but thankfully, the lower court and the appeals court both agreed the plaintiffs had no standing to sue any of the defendants.

The reparations argument has existed for years, with descendents claiming injury from products and services made by companies that had any interest in slavery or had previously benefited from it in the past. This is an absurd contention. Any injuries suffered by these individuals were figments of their own greedy imaginations. This is no different from sham mass tort litigation. Citing expired statues of limitations, the lower court correctly held reparations to be a political issue rather than a legal one, and subsequently the judge dismissed all claims. On appeal, the plaintiffs’ claims were again bounced out based on the same conclusions.

Reparations claims are nothing more than an attempt to rip off companies based on some ridiculous historical basis. So what if JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Aetna profited from slavery? It’s been 140 years since the end of the Civil War. If slaves’ families wanted redress, the time to sue and recover from any company earning profits from slavery related operations was in 1865. Allowing nearly a century and a half to pass before deciding to seek legal recourse effectively barred these descendents from pursuing their cases, and the courts agreed. “Statutes of limitations would be toothless if descendents could collect damages for wrongs against their ancestors,” cited Judge Posner of the 7th Circuit. No honest descendent of a slave could look me in the eye and expect me to believe they’ve suffered some wrong requiring repayment and maintain any credibility whatsoever. Reparations are just an extension of government-sponsored entitlement programs taken to the absurd while trying to extort funds from reputable corporations.

Kudos to the courts for showing what reparations really are – fraud, pure and simple, and hooray for the companies who decided to fight rather than settle, which is most likely what the plaintiffs’ lawyers were hoping for when they took these cases. Pending another appeal, all that’s left now is for the Supreme Court to deny writ of certiorari, and we can put this issue in the trash bin of history where it belongs.