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The Buckeye Institute filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in SEC v. Spartan Securities Group, calling on the court to protect citizens from excessive fines in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment. “Since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, English law and later the English Bill of Rights have prohibited excessive fines… This liberty interest was so vital that in drafting the Eighth Amendment, the Framers of the U.S. Constitution adopted the prohibition on excessive fines verbatim from the 1689 English Bill of Rights.”

The Buckeye Institute filed an amicus brief in St. John v. Jones, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to accept the case and end the unfair practice of awarding third parties, or cy pres recipients—who are wholly unrelated to a lawsuit—a portion of the monetary award that results from a class action lawsuit. “When class action lawsuits were embedded in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 23, there was no thought of the possibility that there might be left-over monies that could not be distributed to class members.”