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March 24, 2010
Ratner's bogus claim of "34 lawsuits," a skewed legal playing field, and video of the ESDC winning ugly (including a dodge regarding belated blight)
Atlantic Yards Report
Another installment in Norman Oder's post-groundbreaking analysis.
As a profession, lawyers get a lousy rap, and the constraints of the field--notably an adversarial system in which winning trumps justice--contribute to depression.
At the groundbreaking, however, developer Bruce Ratner, trained as a lawyer, boosted his brethren and, lying, claimed victory in 34 lawsuits.
Winning ugly
I'll get to the bogus number below, but the key thing to remember is that, while Forest City Ratner and its partner Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) did win, they won ugly.
Real ugly.
Just this month, Supreme Court Justice Marcy Friedman criticized the ESDC's “deplorable lack of transparency.”
In February 2009, Appellate Division Justice James Catterson, while concurring in a decision favoring the ESDC, wrote:
I reject the majority's core reasoning, that a perfunctory "blight study" performed years after the conception of a vast development project should serve as the rational basis for a determination that a neighborhood is indeed blighted.
In 2008, Forest City Ratner lawyer Jeffrey Braun acknowledged that, in a legal document, he had misleadingly attributed a revenue projection to the state rather than to a consultant retained by FCR.
And, as described below, ESDC attorney Philip Karmel couldn't offer a convincing answer when asked during the Court of Appeals oral argument last October to explain the discrepancy between the December 2003 announcement of the project and a much later announcement that the site was blighted.
In fact, Karmel's justification--not noticed at the time--relied on a document kept secret rather than publicly released. Either way, the Court of Appeals majority ignored it.
Posted by eric at March 24, 2010 1:11 PM