From Chris Horner’s book, Red Hot Lies, Chapter 6 titled, Big Government: How Government, Politicians, and Alarmists Abuse Power in the Pursuit of power.
The entirety suggests that what we are seeing unfold in the collaboration between the tort bar, activists, donors and state attorneys general is a step in a progression (or a regression, to read Mr. Justice Jackson):
The federal prosecutor has now been prohibited from engaging in political activities…
[In certain cases] it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm-in which the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group, being attached to the wrong political views, or being personally obnoxious to or in the way of the prosecutor himself.
In times of fear or hysteria· political, racial, religious, social, and economic groups, often from the best of motives, cry for the scalps of individuals or groups because they do not like their views.