COLUMN-Ted Frank's turnaround: Driving a class action for motorists 'imprisoned' by a protest

By Jenna Greene

March 12 (Reuters) - Ted Frank, a conservative public interest lawyer in Washington, D.C., has built a reputation objecting to the terms of class action settlements that he says provide scant benefits to plaintiffs but richly reward their lawyers.

In a twist, Frank and colleagues at the non-profit Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute are pressing a class action of their own, appealing after a federal judge last year blasted their arguments as "baseless," dismissed the case with prejudice, and hit them with to-be-determined monetary sanctions.

Frank and his team brought the case in 2024 on behalf of drivers stuck for hours in a traffic jam while pro-Palestinian protesters blocked a highway near Chicago's O'Hare airport. On its website, Hamilton Lincoln says they sued to hold the activists accountable and "prevent further politically-motivated attacks in the future."

The filing made the novel argument that the motorists were falsely imprisoned in their cars and sought $36 million in damages for thousands of drivers.

The defendants — which include alleged protest organizers and supporters — frame the complaint in court papers as a legally-deficient attempt to attack their political movement.

“Being stuck in traffic does not amount to false imprisonment,” said Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, a lawyer for defendant Wespac Foundation, which describes itself as a "peace and justice action network." The plaintiffs “experienced an utterly routine inconvenience and are trying to turn it into a federal case,” he said, adding that the suit appears to be “motivated, at least in part, by a desire to silence advocacy.” Outside counsel Jenner & Block, which represents co-defendant the Tides Center, did not respond to a request for comment.

The case is now on appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, with oral arguments set for next month.

The litigation raises a recurring question in the law: Where is the line between asserting an innovative legal theory and a frivolous one?

“I’ve never been sanctioned before. It’s not pleasant,” Frank told me. If the penalty stands, Frank added, he fears he’ll be forced to drain his retirement account to pay the defendants’ legal fees. The judge's sanctions order is not yet final and thus not directly before the appellate panel.

Frank has some powerful allies in his corner — 11 Republican attorneys general, who filed an amicus brief in the appeal backing the merits of the suit and calling the sanctions “out of line.”

Hamilton Lincoln lawyers also filed a similar class action in 2025 on behalf of drivers caught up in the Washington, D.C.-area protest. The judge in that case has yet to rule on the defendants’ motion to dismiss.

Frank doesn’t share the protesters’ political views, though he acknowledges their right to express them. What he finds unacceptable, he said, is illegally blocking traffic and trapping ordinary people in the process.

He's also clear that he doesn't look askance at class actions as a whole -- only those where “attorneys have put their own interests ahead of the class’s,” he said.

As a non-profit public interest firm, Hamilton Lincoln can’t bring cases for the payday, Frank said, and tax law limits its proceeds from court-awarded attorneys’ fees.

In dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Mary Rowland in Chicago saw an ulterior motive for the suit. The court “believes that Plaintiff’s filings were presented for the improper purpose of harassment,” she wrote in August, with allegations that “are only a hair’s breadth away from calling Defendants terrorists.”

On closer inspection, though, some of her criticism of the legal claims strikes me as eyebrow-raising. For example, in rejecting allegations of false imprisonment — which Illinois case law has defined as “the unlawful restraint of an individual’s liberty or freedom of locomotion” — Rowland found that the lead plaintiff, who was unable to move his car for more than an hour and missed his flight as a result, was not confined to his vehicle against his will.

He could have exited the car and left it parked on the highway for a week “without facing legal penalties,” she wrote, citing the statutory definition of an abandoned vehicle. But as Frank’s team pointed out, under the Illinois Vehicle Code, a deserted car on the shoulder of the interstate would have been promptly towed.

The judge also said that while protesters may have prevented the man from driving forward, they didn’t personally obstruct him from going backwards. “Defendants did not place any obstacles [in] Plaintiff’s way of leaving,” she wrote.

Frank’s team protested that it’s not legal to turn around and drive the wrong way on a freeway, and even if it was, the cars behind their client were blocking the way for the same reason — the protest.

While Rowland said she appreciated Frank's personal concern with the protesters' alleged conduct, she said that did not give him "carte blanche to make frivolous legal arguments, ignore controlling precedent, and misrepresent existing law in support of his case.”

The litigation is Frank’s brainchild, he told me, and he bridles against the judge's conclusion that his argument is frivolous.

In the weeks leading up to filing the complaint in September 2024, Frank, who is 57, suffered heart failure and had a heart transplant soon after. In a declaration filed with the court last year, he said that given his now “substantially” shortened life expectancy, he has “absolutely zero desire or interest or incentive to spend a single moment of my dwindling time on this planet on a losing case, much less a frivolous one.”

Should the 7th Circuit reverse and remand the case, many questions remain, including whether some defendants can be held liable, given their seemingly tenuous connections to the protestors. But the Hamilton Lincoln lawyers have another request too: Reassign the case to another judge, arguing that in this politically-loaded case, Rowland has already made up her mind.