At the discussion included an overview of aggregate litigation types and how these legal mechanisms solve problems for both plaintiffs and defendants alike to create a “global peace.”

The most generally well-known of these options is Class Action litigation – in which a group of individuals comes together to address an injustice against a powerful defendant – generally a corporation or a government.

“Class actions are a common sense way to solve a shared problem between those harmed and those in power,” said Mark Chalos, managing partner of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein’s Nashville office. “Class action litigation can change the way bad acting companies do business and get compensation for those harmed by wrongful conduct. For companies that believe they have acted properly, class actions can efficiently bring vindication in one fell swoop.”

Another legal mechanism for resolving complex civil cases is by way of multi-district litigation, often referred to as an MDL, which is a system of organizing multiple cases and types of cases against a common defendant (or defendants) in one federal court district for pre-trial proceedings – managed by one judge. Created by Congress in 1968, MDLs benefit plaintiffs, defendants, and American taxpayers by controlling costs, avoiding duplication, and preventing inconsistent pre-trial rulings.

The Southeast Complex Litigation Conference included leading voices from the plaintiffs’ bar, defense bar, government, and the bench, and was presented the Tennessee Bar Association.

About Mark P. Chalos

The Managing Partner of Lieff Cabraser’s Nashville office, Mark P. Chalos (twitter/X: @mpchalos) represents individuals who have suffered catastrophic personal injuries and families whose loved ones died due to the negligence or misconduct of others. Mark has tried cases before juries and judges across the country and serves in the leadership of numerous class actions and multidistrict litigations, including the national opioids litigation. He is Immediate Past-President of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association, an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt University Law School teaching The Practice of Aggregate Litigation, a frequent speaker at legal seminars nationwide on a variety of civil litigation topics, and is regularly cited by top-tier media outlets.

By Mark Chalos
Guest Columnist to The Tennessean, published Oct. 8, 2025

Few safeguards are as critical as the courts are to preserving our constitutional rights.

Courts have, throughout our nation’s history, been the last line of defense against overreaching politicians and the self-serving agendas of special interests. Free speech, religious liberty and jury trials are among the fundamental rights that courts have diligently protected against unrelenting assaults. The protection of our basic rights sometimes arises in contexts where powerful interests are aligned against us.

Courts are only able to protect our constitutional rights if they remain independent and free from undue influence – particularly when the defense of our rights diverges from the current whims of the loudest voices.

An independent judiciary is foundational to our country

The importance of independent judges is foundational to our country. Consider what one of theFramers of our Constitution, Alexander Hamilton, wisely observed in Federalist No. 78:

“This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves.”

Two-hundred years later, President Ronald Reagan, quoting favorably one of his Supreme Court nominees,
said:

“Federal judges are not appointed to decide cases according to the latest opinion polls. They are appointed to decide cases impartially, according to law. But when judicial nominees are assessed and treated like political candidates… the effect… will be… to endanger the independence of the judiciary.”

Judges are pressured to bow to political interests, endangering our rights

Lately, some powerful interests – inside and outside government – have undertaken a strategy of personally attacking judges who make legal rulings with which they disagree. The go-to rhetoric is typically the allegation that the judge is an “extremist” from the opposing political viewpoint.

For example, one high-level government official recently accused a judge who made a ruling he didn’t like as being part of a “legal insurrection.” Another government official who disagreed with a series of rulings hurled a range of insults at various judges, including calling them “incompetent,” “crooked,” “USA hating” and “monsters.” Criticizing judges publicly is by no means a recent invention and has not historically been exclusive to one political party.

But it certainly seems to have heated up in intensity and vitriol recently.

The drumbeat of criticism of judges has evidently had an impact. Esteem for the judiciary reached record lows in 2024, with only 35% of U.S. respondents expressing confidence in the judiciary in one poll. In another recent poll, half the respondents expressed disapproval for the Supreme Court.

This is bad for our country. When judges operate in a politicized environment, under extreme pressure to bow to the will of powerful interests, the rights of all of us are in danger.

Why an independent judiciary is a must

While it might be tempting to applaud when the government silences someone whose opinions we disagree with – even vehemently – the damage such an infringement causes to the right to free speech is universal. Either we all have this right, or none of us do.

And it is important to remember an immutable fact from our country’s history: the political pendulum has always swung both ways. While a ruling group might seem invincibly entrenched, it always, if American history is any guide, has eventually found itself firmly out of power. And political winds change swiftly.

We, as citizens, must have an independent judiciary. Our Constitution provides critical protections against an overreaching government. When the government and other powerful interests seek to violate our constitutional rights, the courts are our last line of defense.

Our Founders did their part in brilliantly providing us the protection of an independent judiciary; we must do our part to preserve it.

PDF Version

Mark Chalos is the Managing Partner of Lieff Cabraser’s Nashville office and a past-president of the Tennessee Trial Lawyers Association.

Congratulations to the valiant and unceasing efforts of the researchers headlining the litigation and the organizations, individuals and law firms representing them in federal court, including Farella Braun + Martel, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, and Berkeley Law Professor Claudia Polsky.

The case is Thakur, et al. v. Trump, No. 25-cv-04737-RFL (N.D. Cal.). The Order can be viewed online.

Plaintiffs seek a declaration that these grant terminations violate the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, and the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process, as well as statutes that govern agencies’ missions and grantmaking and the Administrative Procedure Act. As detailed in the Complaint, these abrupt cancellations of already awarded grants “ignored or contradicted the purposes for which Congress created the granting agencies and appropriated funds, and dispensed with the regular procedures and due process afforded grantees under the Administrative Procedure Act, in implementing the Trump Administration’s political ‘cost-cutting’ agenda and ideological purity campaign.”

According to UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, a leading constitutional law scholar and co-counsel on the case, “President Trump and DOGE have arbitrarily cut off funding to researchers throughout the University of California system in clear violation of the Constitution and federal laws. There has not been a semblance of due process or compliance with the procedures required by federal statutes and regulations. This has caused great harm to a large number of faculty and other researchers and the UC research enterprise as a whole, with potentially grave consequences to everyone in society who benefits from the research in a myriad of disciplines.”

As described by Plaintiff Dr. Neeta Thakur, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at UCSF, “The EPA has abruptly terminated a three-year grant that was supporting research on how wildfire smoke affects the lungs, heart, and brain of all Californians. My colleagues and I at UCSF and UC Berkeley have worked on this important project for two years, and its sudden end — communicated through a simple form letter — puts our progress in danger. This decision disrupts our ongoing work with community-based organizations and stops us from generating life-saving information designed to improve public health and protect the well-being of all Californians, especially those living in at-risk communities.”

Plaintiff Jedda Foreman, the Director of the Center for Environmental Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley, explains, “My team and I at the Lawrence Hall of Science earned NSF grants to make science education more accessible to all learners. Instilling a love of science is critical to envisioning and creating a better future for us all. In one day, we lost two projects, and nearly 75% of our funding, because of terminations by NSF. A week later, NSF terminated yet another one of our projects. These terminations haven’t just affected our team, but also our longtime community partners and thousands of students across the United States.”

These are just two of hundreds of examples of the damage wrought by the Trump Administration’s illegal and unconstitutional terminations.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco, seeks a return to the pre-Trump Administration process of orderly grantmaking that aligns with congressionally authorized purposes, and affords due process to grant-funded researchers. Plaintiffs seek, for themselves and the class of UC researchers who have suffered unlawful grant terminations, an injunction restoring their lost funding, providing them sufficient time to complete the work for which their grants were originally approved, and preventing further illegal grant terminations. Plaintiffs will be filing a motion for a temporary restraining order on June 5, 2025.

The case, No. 3:25-cv-4737, is assigned to the Honorable Rita F. Lin.

Background on the Lawsuit

Each year, researchers in the UC system receive hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from the full spectrum of federal agencies, ranging from the Environmental Protection Agency, to the National Science Foundation, to the National Institutes of Health. These grants fund the production of new knowledge and fuel the development of discoveries that greatly benefit society at large. The grants have also been key to the innovation that has consistently earned the UC system pride of place among research institutions, including first place in the list of universities with the most utility patents. They have also made the UC Berkeley campus the number one ranked public research in institution in the world for nine of the past ten years.

Before President Trump took office, federal grantmaking proceeded under the authority of Congress, which appropriated taxpayer funds for specific public purposes. For decades, agencies carried out these statutory directives and observed due process in making, renewing, and (only seldom) terminating grants. They each adhered to their own grant regulations and followed Administrative Procedure Act processes when modifying such regulations. On the rare occasions when agencies terminated grants, they did so pursuant to predictable, regularized processes and terminated grants only for reasons stated in the regulations. All of this changed abruptly on January 20, 2025 (Inauguration Day).

After January 20, 2025, Defendants Donald J. Trump and DOGE, through a flurry of Executive Orders and other directives, commanded the Federal Agency Defendants to terminate scores of previously awarded research grants. As the Complaint notes, the “abrupt, wholesale, and unilateral termination of these grants has violated the Constitution’s bedrock principle of separation of powers and its guarantees of freedom of speech and due process; flouted the Impoundment Control Act limits on the Executive’s ability to withhold or redirect congressionally appropriated money; ignored statutory requirements that agencies fulfill their substantive missions and fund congressionally specified activities; contravened agency-specific grant-making regulations that cannot by law be revised on an abrupt, unexplained, chaotic basis; and violated the Administrative Procedure Act through this arbitrary, capricious, and ultra vires conduct.”

As further detailed in the Complaint, grounds the agencies have offered for such terminations were spurious. In some cases, agency correspondence to grantees asserted that grant termination would reduce public costs and promote government efficiency, although no evidence was provided to support this claim. In other cases, agency communications made it clear that grants were being terminated to further Defendant Trump’s political objectives, which included the elimination of research on climate, environmental justice, “gender ideology,” and “DEI.” These grant terminations are occurring not because the grant-funded research departed from its originally approved purpose, but because that purpose now offends the political agenda and ideological requirements of the Trump Administration. In terminating these grants, the agencies have violated the Constitution, numerous federal statutes, and their own regulations.

Plaintiff UC researchers have suffered concrete financial, professional, and other harms from Defendants’ unilateral termination of grants for projects to which they have already dedicated time and effort; for research upon which they have staked careers and reputations; and for work with research teams through which they endeavored to train a next generation. These terminations have impaired and will impair the public-serving research mission of the UC system and the concern for public welfare that undergirds it. Named Plaintiffs and the Proposed Class will continue to suffer such harms on an ongoing basis, and will experience increasing and irreparable harm absent the court declaration and injunction they seek through this lawsuit.

Source/Contact

Elizabeth J. Cabraser
LIEFF CABRASER HEIMANN & BERNSTEIN, LLP

Anthony P. Schoenberg
FARELLA BRAUN + MARTEL LLP

In recent weeks, the Trump Administration launched unprecedented attacks on the integrity of judges whose rulings it disagrees with, and singled out for punishment by executive order several law firms that the President perceives represented clients adverse to his personal interests.

We stand with the judges, lawyers, and law firms being unfairly targeted by the Administration under the cover of its purported executive power, as we stand with all those it is unfairly targeting outside the bounds of the legal process. We echo Chief Justice Roberts’ recent reminder of the importance of adhering to our tradition of due process.

Lest silence be mistaken for acquiescence, we are compelled to speak out against these unprecedented attacks. We encourage our colleagues across the bar, and the public, to do the same.

Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP

Media Contact
ACLU-D.C.: media@acludc.org
Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein: media@LCHB.com
Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch: carcos@jaffepr.com
Democracy Forward: press@democracyforward.org

The complaint, filed today before the Merit System Protection Board, was brought on behalf of the federal employees by the ACLU of the District of Columbia (ACLU-D.C.); Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP; Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch PC; and Democracy Forward. The complaint was filed in tandem with numerous charges of discrimination filed by federal employees before federal Equal Employment Opportunity offices.

On January 20 and 21, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, which instructed the Office of Personnel Management to terminate all government activities related to DEI and mandated that federal agencies compile lists of the government’s DEI programs and activities in existence as of November 4, 2024.

Today’s complaint alleges that the resulting mass terminations and other attacks on federal employees who are alleged to have participated in DEI activities violates federal employees’ rights under the First Amendment. The complaint alleges that the Trump administration targeted employees who it perceived as being associated with DEI, including those who no longer performed any DEI-related activities in their current positions and those whose only DEI-related activity was involvement in a training or employee resource group. The complaint alleges that such targeting demonstrates that the Trump administration sought to punish employees for what the administration perceived as their political views.

Today’s complaint also challenges the gender and racial impacts of the anti-DEI executive orders, which disproportionately singled out federal workers who were not white men for hostility, suspicion, job interference, and termination, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

This unlawful targeting has affected federal employees across multiple federal agencies. Today’s Merit Systems Protection Board complaint was filed on behalf of Mahri Stáinnak of the Office of Personnel Management, and it also identifies other affected employees, including Dr. Paige Brown of the Department of Labor, C. Scott of the Department of Labor, and Ronisca Chambers of the Federal Aviation Administration. The federal employees are asking the Board to reinstate them in their positions and to make them whole for the wages they have lost and other damages they have experienced.

“The thousands of federal employees I have worked with in my sixteen and a half years in the federal government are incredibly passionate, skilled, and hard-working people who have dedicated their lives to making our nation safe, healthy, and prosperous,” said plaintiff Mahri Stáinnak of the Office of Personnel Management. “By illegally targeting employees across government, the Trump administration is actually hurting all the people who live and work in this country by denying them the important services we provide.”

“Targeting hard working civil servants because they are associated with an idea the government dislikes violates the First Amendment. President Trump can’t drag us back to a dark chapter in history where the government targeted people simply for their views or values,” said Scott Michelman, legal director at the ACLU-D.C. “The decision to go after people for DEI work they are no longer doing shows the administration’s true motive: to punish employees who they think hold values that clash with the president’s extremist agenda.”

“The work that the Plaintiffs and Class have performed has been critical to our country: they have assisted Americans surviving natural disasters, responded to infectious disease outbreaks threatening our public health, helped secure our borders, assisted in keeping our aircraft and skies safe for travel, ensured that people in rural communities have access to services, worked to ensure hunters and farmers can enjoy public lands, and created pathways for children needing accommodations so they can stay in school and thrive. They have also ensured that government work itself is fair and culturally competent so that public services can be cost-effective and successful,” said Kelly Dermody of Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein. “It is an outrage that their ability to serve the American people has been compromised through a misguided assault on such American values as inclusion and fairness.”

“Targeting federal workers for removal because they were once assigned to DEI duties or participated in agency-sponsored DEI activities violates fundamental principles that underly the civil service—that employees should be treated fairly, without regard to perceived political affiliation, or race, or sex, and that they should be protected against actions taken for partisan political purposes,” said Mary Kuntz of Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch PC.

“This case is about the Trump administration’s arbitrary governing and continued attempts to undermine the government’s ability to work for all people. No American’s life has been made easier or safer by the administration’s decision to arbitrarily terminate non-partisan civil servants. We are honored to represent our clients in this matter and will continue to use all legal tools to protect the American people,” said Skye Perryman, President & CEO at Democracy Forward.

Today’s complaint may be found here: https://www.acludc.org/sites/default/files/field_documents/mspb_class_complaint_stainnak_mahri_as_filed.pdf

Learn about the case and the August 9, 2024 claim filing deadline.

The settlement will resolve all remaining personal injury, consumer class action, and government entity cases brought in the national MDL and the JCCP in California against Altria (the earlier phase of the vast litigation ended in late 2022 when JUUL entered into four substantial coordinated settlements with all plaintiff parties).

The settlement includes over 8,500 personal injury cases, and over 1,400 government entity cases, and a massive class of consumers. “The scope of these suits is beyond vast,” noted Sarah R. London, Co-Lead Counsel for Plaintiffs in the litigation. “This settlement, in combination with the earlier JUUL settlements, marks a stunning and complete resolution of the JUUL/Altria litigation, and adds substantial additional compensation for victims and their families, get real funds to schools for abatement programs, and help local governments further prevent youth use of e-cigarettes across America.”