LAST WEEK’S front page had some happy news: The latest money grab by a lawyer for the Sierra Club failed.

This is something that should happen a lot more often, not only to protect taxpayers from having their pockets picked by special interest groups, but also to keep frivolous lawsuits from clogging up the courts, and to lessen the influence of extremists in politics.

As things stand now, if a busybody in your neighborhood sues the city council, the board of supervisors or any other local government agency because he doesn’t like the decision it made on a local issue — a building permit, a zoning change, or a new ordinance on jaywalking — he can call on a host of highly complex state laws that obligate local governments to adhere to all sorts of Byzantine procedures and regulations before they do anything. The rules apply to a wide variety of decisions, from the trivial to the momentous, were enacted without regard to concepts like “majority rule,” and come loaded with ambiguous words such as “reasonable” and “significant” that make it impossible for even the best informed mayor or county supervisor to be certain what he is supposed to do.
Thus, California law provides the embittered activists who take up all the public comment time at city council and board of supervisors meetings with plenty of opportunities to turn whatever their little obsessions may be into lawsuits.

And it offers them a high likelihood of winning those lawsuits because, whatever a city or a county may do, there’s a good chance a case (even if only a far-fetched one) can be made that it violated at least one state law.
On top of all that, the California Legislature has provided a wonderful incentive for the activists to file these lawsuits, because when they win, which they usually do, even if only on trivial grounds, they can ask the court to order the taxpayers of the losing city or county to pay their legal fees, which usually amount to many hundreds of thousands of dollars. The justification for this insane system is that activists bring their lawsuits on behalf of the public and  therefore shouldn’t have to pay for them — the taxpayers should.

The system of awarding legal fees to activists who file successful lawsuits was put in place precisely to empower them to thwart majority rule in favor of their narrow environmental agenda, and it has worked to perfection. In fact, it has worked so well that even Democrats are getting sick of it. Even far-left politicians such as Gov. Jerry Brown have begun calling for changes to the state’s lawsuit-laden system of environmental protection laws.

So far, the governor has made only very limited recommendations for reform. If he wants to get serious, he should also change the system of forcing the public to pay lawyers who sue the public.

In fact, in civil court, the rule should be simple: Win or lose, everybody pays their own attorneys.