Hillary Clinton's VP pick once litigated fair-housing cases and won a record $100M verdict
Tim Kaine.
Hillary Clinton’s vice presidential pick, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, is a Harvard law graduate who once worked at small law firms litigating civil-rights and fair-housing cases.
The Virginia senator’s biggest financial win of his legal career was a $100 million jury verdict against Nationwide Insurance, report Law.com and Mother Jones. Kaine was representing Housing Opportunities Made Equal, known as HOME, which issued a press release (PDF) on the victory and other fair-housing cases litigated by Kaine.
The suit had alleged Nationwide discriminated in homeowners’ insurance by using racial profiling to identify target markets, pulling its agents out of neighborhoods with substantial minority populations, and denying insurance for homes in black neighborhoods. The $100 million punitive verdict was the largest civil rights verdict in U.S. history at the time, according to the press release.
The Virginia Supreme Court overturned the verdict on the ground HOME lacked standing to sue. After the state supreme court agreed to reconsider the verdict, Nationwide settled for $17.5 million. Kaine’s Richmond, Virginia, law firm, Mezzullo & McCandlish, got a third of the settlement, according to a timeline by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Before Kaine became a partner at Mezzullo & McCandlish, now known as McCandlish Holton, he was an associate at Little, Parsley & Cluverius, according to the Times-Dispatch timeline. Before that, he clerked for Circuit Judge R. Lanier Anderson of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Kaine described himself as a former civil rights lawyer at a rally on Saturday. “I brought dozens of lawsuits when I was in private practice, battling banks, landlords, real estate firms, insurance companies and even local governments that had treated people unfairly,” Kaine said.
He also represented death-row inmates in two pro bono cases, the New York Times reports. As governor, Kaine commuted one capital sentence to life in prison. He did not intervene in 11 other executions.
