We would like to express our thanks to all of the clients who contacted us last week concerning their Petition for judicial review of the IRP they received. It was an extremely busy week for us, but we got the job done.
We appreciate the patience exercised by everyone who called. We also appreciate the interesting ideas many people have about the judicial challenges to the IRP scheme itself. Many people have a lot of thoughtful ideas.
Most people opted to keep up the litigation. This applied to the clients who fell in the categories wherein the Government wanted to pull their license this week. As a result we filed dozens of amended Petitions to address Sivia and to introduce new arguments. We served the Attorney General with the amended Petitions and affidavits of supporting documents. When we receive their response to each Petition, we will set dates for the hearing of each matter.
We expect that in a few cases the Government will simply consent to the remedy sought because the decisions of the OSMV tribunal would be overturned in any event given they were decided before Spencer. A number of decisions were clearly reverse engineered like in Spencer so that losing was the only option. We expect that the Government doesn’t want dozens of Spencer-like cases to embarrass them.
We can tell you that the reason we cut so close to the line was that the lawyers who were doing the Sivia appeal had hoped that they could get into the Court of Appeal late last week. They hoped to apply to the Court of Appeal to get a ruling that would suspend everything until the merits of the Sivia appeal are considered in the full-blown hearing.
We waited as long as we could before contacting our clients and posting the notice that we needed to hear from our clients. We knew how quickly we could put together all the Petitions, even under pressure, but we didn’t want to do it if it was possible to avoid putting our clients through this stress.
Again, thanks to all of our clients for contacting us. Many people told us that they want to push ahead because they feel there is a moral obligation to take on a bad law. We agree.