Around 2 a.m. one night in the summer of 2022, five friends walked out of a club in the Loop and got into an argument with a man who then pulled a gun. He fired a Glock pistol at them, one that had been illicitly converted into an automatic weapon capable of unleashing 20 rounds every second. A witness in a nearby apartment said the spray of bullets sounded like fireworks. Two people were killed\u2009\u2014\u2009shot in the head and chest. Three others were hit but survived.<\/p>\n
Mass shootings like this are too common in Chicago, but now they could become less frequent, thanks to legal pressure the city has applied to Glock. In 2024, the city sued the Austria-based gunmaker and its U.S. subsidiary, accusing them of knowingly producing and marketing handguns that could readily be transformed into illegal machine guns. All it took to make the change was a cheap add-on known as a Glock switch, which could be ordered online or 3D-printed. According to the city, in the three years leading up to the suit, the Chicago Police Department recovered 1,300 of these modified Glocks.<\/p>\n
In October, the gunmaker relented. After failing to persuade a judge to dismiss Chicago\u2019s suit, Glock announced that it would stop all production and sales of its easily adapted pistols. It was a major victory for the city\u2009\u2014\u2009and for its law department\u2019s affirmative litigation division, which brought the suit.<\/p>\n
Municipal law departments usually represent a city when it\u2019s a defendant in civil cases. But of the 250 attorneys Chicago employs, seven make up the affirmative litigation division, which operates like a tiny public interest law firm within city governments; they safeguard the rights of local consumers, workers, and tenants by suing companies or entire industries to make them change behaviors and pay steep restitution. \u201cWe are trying to use affirmative litigation to protect our residents and hold bad actors accountable,\u201d says Stephen Kane, the division\u2019s head.<\/p>\n
These were the lawyers behind the city\u2019s suing of Juul Labs for marketing its e-cigarettes to kids, adding to the legal pressure that forced the company in 2023 to stop the practice and pay Chicago $23.8 million to go toward public health. The division was also behind the city\u2019s 2022 settlement with Uber Eats and Postmates, in which the food delivery services paid $10 million after being accused of \u201cdeceptive and unfair practices,\u201d like fees above caps. The city has even taken on Hyundai and Kia, accusing them of making their cars easier to steal by failing to install industry-standard antitheft technology; property management firms for roping in tenants with duplicitous rent-to-own contracts that often resulted in evictions; and some of the world\u2019s largest oil and gas corporations for allegedly lying about their part in causing climate change.<\/p>\n
\n\u201cWe are trying to use affirmative litigation to protect our residents and hold bad actors accountable.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2014 Stephen Kane, head of Chicago\u2019s affirmative litigation division<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In total since 2023, the city has secured more than $90 million in restitution and civil penalties from those it has sued. \u201cThis division is probably one of my most impactful in terms of the day-to-day life of citizens,\u201d says Mary Richardson-Lowry, who as Chicago\u2019s corporation counsel is in charge of the city\u2019s entire legal team.<\/p>\n
Chicago started its affirmative litigation division in 2018, with four full-time attorneys. The Trump administration was then\u2009\u2014\u2009as now\u2009\u2014\u2009attempting to withhold federal funding over Chicago\u2019s Welcoming City Ordinance, and attorneys who regularly defended the city in lawsuits suddenly had to go into plaintiff mode and take the federal government to court. At the time, Chicago was also engaged in a lawsuit against Equifax, over a data breach, and in ongoing opioid litigation that would eventually mean $78 million from a national settlement to be paid out over 18 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This kind of city-led plaintiff-side impact litigation reflects a shift in culture at municipal legal offices. In 2006, San Francisco became the first city in the nation to form a dedicated affirmative litigation unit\u2009\u2014\u2009just after it sued California to strike down a ban on same-sex marriage\u2009\u2014\u2009and Kathleen Morris was put in charge of it. She managed a dozen attorneys, at first getting only 10 percent of their time. They sought out cases that personal injury lawyers, nonprofits, state\u2019s attorneys, and the Justice Department wouldn\u2019t or couldn\u2019t take on. \u201cThere are civil laws that are going unenforced because no one has the incentive to enforce them,\u201d says Morris, now a law professor. \u201cIt\u2019s not perfect law enforcement. But it helps to rehabilitate people\u2019s view of whether government is on their side.\u201d The nonprofit Public Rights Project has since led the effort to spread affirmative litigation units to a few dozen other cities\u2009\u2014\u2006including New York, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Oakland\u2009\u2014\u2009and train some 250 local government attorneys.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year, Chicago\u2019s affirmative litigation attorneys have helped the city file seven lawsuits against the second Trump administration and joined numerous third-party cases, managing to stop the withholding of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to the city. The unit has been pressed into triage on multiple fronts. With the federal government abdicating enforcement of many of its own regulations and consumer protections, and with a Justice Department steered away from civil rights work, cities are being compelled by necessity to step into the breach. \u201cThis is a division absolutely built for this moment and the onslaught of work coming their way,\u201d says Richardson-Lowry. To handle that increasing workload, she hopes to bump up the number of affirmative litigation attorneys in the next year to 11, if the city can come up with the money.<\/p>\n
Chicago\u2019s lawsuit against Glock was the first to test Illinois\u2019s 2023 Firearms Industry Responsibility Act, which attempts to outmaneuver a 20-year-old federal law that mostly indemnified gunmakers from civil liability. Linda Mullenix, a mass tort expert and the author of Outgunned No More, sees Chicago\u2019s suit against Glock as a major development in a legal \u201crevolution\u201d that started in 2019, when the civil action against Remington Arms after the 2012 Sandy Hook killings was allowed to proceed. She says the Chicago case could rewrite how gun companies do business in this country. \u201cIt\u2019s a snowball effect,\u201d Mullenix says. \u201cEventually, the entire industry is going to come to the table and say, \u2018Let\u2019s settle this out.\u2019 That\u2019s what happened with tobacco.\u201d<\/p>\n
Although Glock has stopped making the modifiable pistols, Chicago\u2019s affirmative litigation team isn\u2019t done with its lawsuit. The city is still seeking financial penalties against the company for the multiplied harm these weapons caused.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Around 2 a.m. one night in the summer of 2022, five friends walked out of a club in…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":433217,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[200962,960,200965,200969,200958,200959,5386,200960,1818,200964,200967,200970,200966,200961,200968,200963],"class_list":{"0":"post-433216","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-affirmative-litigation-division","9":"tag-chicago","10":"tag-civil-penalties","11":"tag-firearms-industry-responsibility-act","12":"tag-glock","13":"tag-glock-switch","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-illegal-machine-guns","16":"tag-illinois","17":"tag-juul-labs","18":"tag-kathleen-morris","19":"tag-linda-mullenix","20":"tag-mary-richardson-lowry","21":"tag-municipal-law","22":"tag-public-rights-project","23":"tag-stephen-kane"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115683928609837679","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=433216"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/433216\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/433217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=433216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=433216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=433216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}