August, 2026
Washington and Lincoln — The several cases I initiated in federal court in 2007, about which I have written in multiple blog posts, have taken on lives of their own, and all for the better.
Our Fourth Circuit case against state-created student loan giant PHEAA, stripping it of sovereign immunity and allowing it to be sued by its victims, has been cited as precedent in the 2024 MOHELA case in the Tenth Circuit, among other courts. The defining factors that our case established were further streamlined by the Supreme Court this year in its Galette decision. The resulting restriction of the Eleventh Amendment will benefit millions in many economic sectors and be a bulwark against corruption.
For anyone who may be writing an academic or law journal article about these cases, there is a backstory of interest in how PHEAA perjury helped us define the factors. We defined them mindful of our request that the court sanction PHEAA officials for perjury. Which it did. PHEAA had to concede a factor that was crucial to our success in the case.
Our several cases against for-profit lenders were dormant after their 2010 settlements, until filmmaker Michael Camoin in 2023 asked the federal Eastern District of Virginia to unseal redacted documents. After much back and forth with the Fourth Circuit, he prevailed in what may be a landmark decision against corporate "settle and seal" strategies that keep the public from seeing what was settled out of sight. Camoin is a huge expansion of First Amendment press freedoms and another blow against corruption. It is being cited in other circuits.
Again, there is an unusual backstory. The district court seems to have destroyed the documents at issue, in violation of federal retention requirements. Although the Oberg documents were eventually found, it reveals that many documents in many federal courts have been lost or destroyed. There is a real danger that judges will try to ignore Camoin out of embarrassment. That would be a mistake.
Two decades have passed since the original decision to bring the cases. Fortuitous outcomes were never assured, but the cases now have taken on lives of their own in constitutional jurisprudence, and their future looks bright.
