“I don’t know of any other cases that have been quite this ridiculous,” said Paul Rothstein, a professor of law at Georgetown University.
"It's outrageous and it's shameful,'' Bill Schulz, spokesman for the American Association for Justice, the largest trial lawyer group in the nation, told ABC News. The A.A.J. filed a complaint about Pearson recently with the District of Columbia bar association.
Schulz said the case is an embarrassing anomoly that "should not be used as an indictment against the civil justice system in this country because, it works quite well, thank you, for people -- ordinary people -- who are seeking real justice for real cases of negligence and wrongdoing."
“You are not a we, you are an I,” Judge Bartnoff said in one of several testy exchanges with Judge Pearson. “You are seeking damages on your own behalf, and that is all.”
“The plaintiff has decided to use his intimate knowledge of the District of Columbia laws and legal systems to exploit non-English-speaking immigrants who work in excess of 70 hours per week to live the American dream,” Mr. Manning says in court papers.
In 2002, after a disagreement over another pair of Pearson's pants which Custom Cleaners allegedly lost - and compensated him for with $150 - Pearson was banned from the store, defense attorney Christopher Manning claimed in court.
Manning said that Pearson pleaded with the Chungs to let him back into the store, because he didn't have a car, he said, and they were the only dry cleaners in the neighborhood.
Judge Pearson’s future as an administrative law judge is in limbo. His two-year term expired on May 2, and a judicial panel has yet to decide on his reappointment.
In the meantime, Judge Pearson remains on the city payroll as an attorney adviser to the Office of Administrative Hearings, at a salary of $100,512.
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