Legal rules allocate power and control behavior in societies. Historically, legal rules have been weapons used to keep things the way that the people who control the state want them to be. The rules protect them from others, including those they oppress, cheat, and injure. At the end of the day, what we choose to excuse, condemn, and punish often depends on values that are difficult to articulate but are nonetheless strongly felt.

So it is with class-action litigation. I believe that class-action suits provide ordinary people with access to the courts so that they can stand up to companies and interests seeking to hurt or take advantage of them. This system treats everyone fairly, regardless of how much money they have. Others look at it and see no redeeming virtue, just abusive, extortionist suits that let lawyers make a lot of money. But I don’t believe that the price fixers who cheat consumers, the polluters who hurt our environment, the tobacco companies that target children, and the dishonest drug companies that conceal negative results of studies or lie about drugs’ side effects should be allowed to operate with impunity.

What kind of legal system do we want? One that allows lawyers to pay plaintiffs a share of fees earned in prosecuting meritorious cases, or one that discourages meritorious cases because plaintiffs cannot share in the fees and are thus unwilling to endure the torment of serving as the plaintiff ?

Most shareholder lawsuits are valid and settled based on their merits. The Securities and Exchange Commission has repeatedly recognized the importance of private enforcement. So have the courts. Members of Congress have stressed the importance of private-­enforcement suits. The repeated financial frauds of Wall Street and public companies—and the recoveries obtained for victims by class-action suits—attest to this fundamental truth.

The federal government profits by hundreds of millions of dollars every year from a system in which plaintiffs expose wrongdoing by drug companies, Medicare providers, and defense contractors; sue them on behalf of the government; and get a cut of the recovery.

Today, most stockholder cases are brought by institutional investors—particularly pension funds. Many of these are dangerously underfunded, in no small part because of the losses they have suffered as a result of fraudulent conduct in the financial markets. Any reward that goes to a pension fund for serving as a plaintiff in a meritorious case will not benefit the trustees or managers of the fund personally. Rather, the money will help the workers and retirees who are the fund’s beneficiaries. If we compensate securities class-action plaintiffs by giving them a cut of the recovery or lawyers’ fee, we align their interests with the victims they represent. The more they and their lawyer recover for the fraud’s victims, the bigger the payment they share. What is wrong with that?

In today’s antilitigation climate, in which the Supreme Court has recently turned its back on Enron victims and consistently ruled in favor of Wall Street, drug companies, and other corporate interests, there’s little chance that reforms will be adopted. But times will change. As the inexorable efforts of corporate interests and their judicial allies to restrict access to the courts mount and go unchecked, and companies are not held accountable for their misdeeds, public opinion will turn against such a one-sided system. Perhaps some day, a young scholar or legislative aide researching a way to fix the system will see some virtue in changing the status quo.

Prosecutors have discretion in deciding what cases to bring and what charges to assert. At what point do ethical violations become serious enough to be considered criminal cases that should be prosecuted? Obviously, federal prosecutors, who are ­presidential appointees, can exercise their discretion selectively or punitively, for political reasons. And the political influence exercised by the Justice Department under the Bush administration has been well documented—think of ­Alabama governor Don Siegelman and the several U.S. attorneys who have been fired.

One of our plaintiffs was “paid” through a law firm that had long been closely associated with—and represented—the Republican Party in California. If a conspiracy to make an undisclosed fee split was the crime, why wasn’t the law firm that actually made the fee split with the plaintiff prosecuted?

On the other hand, I sued Halliburton for securities fraud and accused Dick Cheney, then Halliburton’s C.E.O., of pocketing $40 million via insider trading—a suit that the court allowed to move forward and could have resulted in my taking Cheney’s deposition had I stuck around. My partners and I were also high-profile Democratic activists who had contributed millions to the party and its causes. This may all be a coincidence, but if you are in my shoes, it’s a disturbing one.

Am I angry about all this? Of course I am. The Justice Department has investigated my old firm for the entire time Bush has been in office. The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles who oversaw our case later went to Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, which has essentially become the West Coast branch of the Bush Justice Department, having landed a lucrative partnership and a high-paying post monitoring a deal the Justice Department has brokered.

The prosecutors never identified a single case that I filed as frivolous. Those cases were won or lost based on their merits. We earned the legal fees awarded in the cases we won through hard work. Before me and my partners, no one had ever been prosecuted for splitting a legal fee with a plaintiff. The conduct was industry practice. Yet the Justice Department wanted it to be criminalized and found a federal statute to use. Then the power of the system was brought to bear. I was unwilling to risk my firm or my partners, or getting a seven-year jail ­sentence. So I pleaded guilty.

I’ll see you in 24 months.