Judges are not business experts

A DNC-affiliated New York judge determined, in a highly irregular summary judgment, that former president Trump’s detailed financial valuation statements used to finance or refinance certain real estate and related businesses were overstated, or inflated, and suddenly an area of judicial concern, despite these valuations having been unchallenged and in good standing, in some cases for decades.  Why suddenly now is a judge making such a determination against them, and more importantly, how? 

In summary judgments, there can be no genuine dispute as to any material fact, and any such judgment must be made as a matter of law.  In Trump’s case, facts were disputed, and no law was followed, while due process was apparently an inconvenience in the court’s rush to serve its political masters.

The Trump business documentation at issue is otherwise not something even produced by the defendant, but rather by expert third parties including accounting, engineering, and law firms through opinion letters, and cost and valuation attestation under their regulated authority.  Moreover, even in large real estate markets like New York, everyone knows everyone else, and especially, they all know market prices because they are all market makers, whether builders, developers, banks or brokers.  All parties to such voluntary, arms-length business transactions are free to challenge anyone else’s numbers and accept them, modify them, or reject them. 

Apparently, the court is the only entity with an objection, and one that is merely an uninformed personal opinion of a judge.  It has no basis in accounting, business, or law.  Moreover, no private party brought forth a complaint, which exposes the prosecutor as the moving party and raises many questions as to its standing, among others factors.

The judge in this case is a graduate of NYU Law.  This school is among many, including Harvard, Yale, Chicago, and Berkeley, that are especially unbalanced ideologically and act as effective progressive-left training camps.  Law faculty there also systematically lobby as political activists for the DNC, with the support of their institutions.

Former federal appellate judge, author, and University of Chicago Law lecturer Richard Posner once stated that judges are not law professors.  But they‘re also not accountants or business economists, and rarely do they have even basic business operating experience, let alone the kind necessary to understand sophisticated finance and deal structures.  Even if they did, it would have to include relevant experience in specific industrial sectors such as commercial real estate, manufacturing, technology, and many others.  As Posner states,

American judges operate in a setting of extreme uncertainty, which forces them to exercise an uncomfortably large amount of discretion. They are reluctant to admit that they are “occasional legislators,” and have been skillful in concealing the fact from the public, being abetted in this regard by the legal profession, which has an interest in depicting the law as a domain of sophisticated reasoning rather than, to a considerable extent, of politics and emotion. The secrecy of judicial deliberations is an example of the tactics used by the judiciary to conceal the extent to which such deliberations resemble those of ordinary people. The concealment feeds a mystique of professionalism that strengthens the judiciary in its competition for power.

What do judges actually know, then?  If they’re sitting in a state or federal court system, they should know various areas of statutory law, but especially court procedure and rules.  Procedure is how the legal system works in the Judiciary; court rules must be followed if both sides to a complaint are to be accorded equal benefit of the law.  Especially for defendants, this is vital, for two reasons: plaintiffs often receive some implied advantage in the court system because they are the “moving” party, seeking to use the court to advance their interests (the Plaintiff Bar also play a role in certain favoritism because they bring business into the court, creating fees and justifying court budgets and expenses).  The other reason comes into play when the plaintiff is a prosecutor.  As noted defense attorney Gerry Spence has said, he never once saw government prosecutors fully follow the rules.

In President Trump’s case, how could such complicated business matters be determined so summarily, by non-experts, and survive with such personal and vindictive opinion attached to them on the record?  In a word, they can’t.  Legally.

This case also has the appearance of a business shakedown, and there remains a question of who benefits commercially, by potentially stripping Trump of his premium real estate assets and state business licenses.  Hostile takeovers often include government administrative cooperation including the Judiciary, which appears in this case to have been penetrated by political and business interests.  Tammany Hall culture was never really uprooted in New York City, or anywhere else.

Matthew G. Andersson is the author of the upcoming book Legally Blind.  A former CEO, he has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the National Academy of Sciences in law and economics.  He has testified before the U.S. Senate and is a graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.  He studied with White House national security advisor W.W. Rostow at the LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Image via Picryl.